Within weeks, Harry returns and tells Sybylla he is off to Sydney to recoup his fortune. He promises he will return before she turns 21. Sybylla promises to stay true, and as he departs, she cries uncontrollably. She recalls, “I loved Harry as much as I could ever love anyone” (72).

Into the new year, Sybylla misses Harry but finds contentment in her routine: “I forgot all my wild unattainable ambitions in the little pleasures of everyday life” (73). A letter arrives from Sybylla’s mother. Her father is deeply in debt to a dirt farmer named Peter M’Swat. Dick has no means to pay him back, and, desperate, he promises Sybylla to the M’Swat farm in Barney’s Gap to serve as governess-servant to their nine children for a year. Sybylla is outraged, but her mother says the family needs her to help. Two weeks later, Sybylla is on a carriage heading to the remote town of Barney’s Gap: “My pleasant life […] was going into the past, fading as the hills which surrounded it were melting into a hazy line of blue” (76).

The M’Swat farm is as bad as Sybylla feared. It is a tiny rundown farmhouse with just two rooms and a tin roof that magnifies the summer heat. Because there is no fencing, chickens and pigs run everywhere, including in the house.

Sybylla quickly decides that the children are unkempt and unruly and the mother lazy. The house smells of animal waste and onions. There are no books—only cheap glossy popular magazines. The only redeeming object is a piano. After dinner the first night, the family begs Sybylla to play their “pianey,” but Sybylla finds too many keys broken. It is useless. That night, she cries herself to sleep.

The next morning, Sybylla writes a letter to her grandmother—not her mother—begging her to get her back to Caddagat. She waits weeks for an answer, but it comes from her mother who tells her to grow up and stop thinking about herself.

Days crawl by. Desperate, bored, and sinking into “dead monotony” (88), Sybylla reads anything she can find. She even reads the farming diary the father keeps, a dismal record of daily feeding of the animals and the weather. Paging through one of the magazines one day, she comes across a profile of promising new singers in Sydney. She thinks that should be her, with the glamor and the money. Watching the children is difficult. They seldom mind her, not even during the lessons. But she envies their “ignorant contentment,” comparing herself to a “duck being forced to live in a desert” (88).