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Millicent had said she was in the garden and he'd gone out to look for her. She wasn't on any of the beautifully built “rustic” seats in their rose-smothered arbours, nor in the fern-house, moist and abundantly green with its pool of goldfish and its tiny artificial waterfall. He'd looked beneath the row of camphor laurels and even up into the branches of a couple of the larger ones, and then he'd followed the path round to
the back and stood for a moment at a loss. He mightn't have found her then only that he wanted to look at the passion-vine, and there on the other side of its trellis he'd come on her sitting with her back against the chopping-block, and her arms clasped round her knees. He'd realised presently that it was the only spot in the garden with the exception of that dank and depressing fernery which was not visible either from the house or the road. When he did his amusement faded; it did not seem any longer particularly funny to conduct what was after all, in a sense, a romantic interview, with the wood-pile and the vegetables and a heap of garden rubbish for a setting— She must want pretty badly to be alone – must feel, he thought, fresh from his 70,000 acres, rottenly cramped and restricted in this bit of a suburban garden—

She'd glanced up as she heard his step, and waited without moving. She looked rather alarmingly young with her curly hair brushed back behind her ears and swinging just clear of her shoulders, and the skirt of her pale blue frock spreading round her like a pool of moonlight. He said:

“Hallo, I've been searching the garden for you.” And she explained with a note that made him feel he had sounded complaining:

“I didn't know you were here.”

There was a wheelbarrow near by so he turned it upside down and sat on it facing her and wondering how to begin.

“May I smoke?”

“Yes.”

“Will you?”

“Thanks.”

Still, by the time their cigarettes were lighted, he had
no words ready. She didn't seem to be disposed to help, either, and that had annoyed him rather. So he said presently, politely:

“Noble cabbages.”

She looked at them and answered indifferently, “Yes.”

“Do you like spinach?”

She met his eyes then, and a little glint crept into her own.

“Very much indeed. Do you?”

“Not at all.”

“What a pity. They say it's full of vitamins.”

“What are vitamins?”

“I haven't the least idea.”

There was a pause then. For the first time, born out of their swift exchange of absurdities, he had felt a faint liking for her. He remembered thinking, poor fool that he'd been, that if, to her undeniable though wrong-headed honesty she could add a spark of humour they ought to get along all right. So he said:

“Let's begin again. About this – well, about our wedding. When is it to be?”

“Whenever you like.”

“I should think the sooner the better. I – we're busy at Coolami – I don't want to be away too long.”

“Is there any need for you to be away at all? I mean, as far as I'm concerned we can be married this afternoon and leave for Coolami to-night.”

He looked at her doubtfully. It was so impossible to know what she was feeling. He could only trust to Millicent who had said, “Don't take her straight back to Coolami, Bret. So short a time – just give her a breathing space somewhere else.” So he said:

“Well, we want to be – or to seem – as orthodox as possible. What about a week or a fortnight at the seaside – I'd like some surfing – haven't had any for years.”

He did think that for a
second he saw a flicker of relief pass over her face. But she only said:

“Just as you like.”

Her complete acquiescence chilled him. He said quickly:

“I want to be agreeable, Susan. If we're to be married we may as well be as nearly friends as possible.” A suspicion of the grin which occasionally made him look so like Ken passing fleetingly over his face, he added, “After all, I'm fifteen years older than you, so you can look forward to a happy widowhood.”

She'd cried furiously:

“Don't! Don't say such – stupid things!”

Then he felt it again. Something elusive and disturbing. Some factor in his problem which he was failing to take into account. Something incomplete in his knowledge of her. He shrugged.

“Sorry.”

She said still flushed, still angry:

“You haven't got to do this. You know very well that I must take an escape for the baby when it's offered to me. But you needn't offer it. There's no reason why you should. I – I wish you'd never thought of it—!”

He'd answered her coldly, remembering again, suddenly and vividly, Jim's bandaged face and head and his difficult words.

“We've had all this out before. It's settled. But I feel that to begin with – with resentment and hostility, is asking for more trouble than we need necessarily have.”

She said slowly, playing with a little pile of chips which she had heaped beside her:

“I don't feel
hostile – and if I have any resentment it isn't against you.”

He said sharply:

“Not against Jim?”

“Oh, no-no!”

His anger, ready to flare in Jim's defence, sank into contrition when he saw her eyes wet with tears. And he felt again a vague uneasiness which had been nagging at him these past few days; a feeling that perhaps his present to Jim's child of the name it should have borne was not, after all, the beginning and end of the fulfilment of his promise. Not much use, he admitted, giving marriage with one hand and years of misery with the other—

He said:

“Look here, Susan, I suppose I've said some pretty rotten things to you since – since this happened. You can't exactly blame me – I don't blame myself altogether. After all, you go in for honesty, don't you?”

She gave him a queer glance.

“I did.”

He said ironically:

“Well, it's a bit too late to reform now. It seems to me that all we can do is to – to forget this— All right,” he burst out, answering her expression, “—pretend to forget it, if you like, but we've got to have a – a truce of sorts. One can't spend one's life fighting, even in a marriage of convenience.”

She didn't move or answer. Her eyes were dry again, but the stillness of her face gave it a look of hopelessness, of unquestioning abandonment to grief. Bret dropped his cigarette butt at his feet and trod it into the ground. It must have been because he was pretty well exhausted both physically and mentally that he'd lost his temper so easily during those few days. He didn't remember ever feeling before what he'd felt then, and what, even now though more faintly, he felt sometimes when they were quarrelling – a definite desire to hurt her. Watching her sitting there on the ground, so motionless, so utterly unresponsive to his well-meant efforts, it had overwhelmed him alarmingly, a bewildering dark tide, unfamiliar and strangely exciting. He beat it down disgustedly and said:

“You needn't
even live at Coolami unless you want to. Just now and then for the sake of appearances.”

She looked up, and he thought it was queer how an expression could wipe the youth from her face. She asked:

“And what would you get out of that?”

His control broke away from him in sudden mad exasperation. He answered smoothly:

“I don't expect to get much out of it, anyhow.”

Her face flamed. He waited for the return thrust which would make him feel that his blow had been part of a battle. Instead she said nothing, and he found himself in the position of one who has attacked an unresisting foe. That had made him angrier still. He heard his voice adding:

“No more than I can get any day for a few pounds.”

There in the back seat of the Madison he put his hand up to his head for a moment as if, after all this time, such a memory were still almost unendurable. A black rage, whipped up from God knows where, and over in a moment. But while it lasts you can say such things—

He glanced sideways at Susan. She was asleep in her corner with her hair tumbled across her cheeks and her
mouth slightly open. It had been slightly open that day, too, when she'd sat with the flare of colour draining out of her face and her eyes, which looked as if they could hardly believe her own hurt, fixed on him. He'd got up and gone away nearly to the house and then come back again to find her still sitting there with her head bent, arranging her chips elaborately in a star-shaped pattern. He'd apologised briefly, not daring to say more for fear it should lead to another tangle of words, another treacherous morass of emotion.

She said listlessly:

“It's all right,” and then added, “We haven't decided yet when the wedding is to be. If you still want to go on with it.”

“Of course.”

“To-morrow, then?”

“Very well.”

She stood up, brushing and smoothing her skirt mechanically. He noticed that there was a faint vertical line between her brows – as though she had a headache. She said slowly:

“Talking of honesty – you said it was too late to reform. This isn't a marriage of convenience for me. I've been in love with you for months.”

She'd gone away then, though he hardly saw her go, standing there with a slow, ridiculous flush burning his face and the back of his neck – dumbfounded, aghast.

D
REW
stopped the
car on a downward slope because all his life he would never outgrow the economical habit of saving his self-starter, and asked expansively:

“How about a spot of food?”

Bret glanced up from his rueful contemplation of Susan's sleeping face, and Millicent from her memories. “Where are we?”

Drew shrugged.

“How should I know – a poor City mug? We passed a town of sorts a while back.”

Bret said:

“That would be Cudgegong. We aren't very far from Mudgee now.”

Susan woke up with a yawn and a shiver. She looked out straight at a willow-fringed creek where she'd lunched once with Jim, at a fence she'd clambered over to fall, laughing, into his eager arms, at a whole remembered scene flung back at her with such brutal vividness that she seemed to feel suddenly on her lips the kisses he'd taken, hear his very voice, ghost-like, say,
“Susan, Susan darling, you'll feel differently some day
—!”

She said shakily:

“Is it worth while stopping, do you think?” And bent down to do something unnecessary to her shoe because she felt Bret's quick eyes on her. Drew said:

“Well, I'm
hungry
. And you said the last bit was slow
going, didn't you, Bret? After we turn off the main road?”

“Rough surface,” Bret answered with his eyes still on Susan, “and gates galore.”

He wondered if she'd been dreaming. Her hands, still fiddling with her shoe-buckle, weren't quite steady, but her face was hidden by her forward-falling hair. Millicent decided:

“Oh, well, there's heaps of time. And Margery doesn't expect us till latish afternoon. So let's stop for a little while if you're hungry, Tom.” And she added, to Susan, “Did you have a nice sleep, darling?”

Susan sat up. Well, this was just one more of the little twistings of the knife in the wound. She should be used to them by now. So she answered, “Yes, thanks.” And climbed out of the door Bret had opened for her. She was still tired, and now she felt hot and grubby as well, and she wondered, glancing at her watch, what time they'd get to Kalangadoo where she could have a wash and put on something cooler than this beastly flannel frock.

Drew was looking round for a place to spread his rug. She watched him with a dull determined indifference. There was so obviously only one place to picnic, there where the smooth grass sloped down to the water, and two trees gave a sparse but grateful shade. He squeezed, grunting, through the wire of the fence, and called:

“Come on, this is the spot,” and spread his rug triumphantly where, through an abrupt, involuntary film of tears she still seemed to see Jim's long figure stretched out on its back, his hands clasped under his head, his brown laughing face turned towards a ghostly Susan—

Bret, just beside
her, said, “Susan?” And she glanced at him, startled. He asked in a low voice, desperately, helplessly, “What is it?” But she whisked a handkerchief, and blew her nose, and said quickly, “Nothing. Why?” So he shrugged and held the wire of the fence up for her, and she climbed through and walked slowly down to the trees.

Bret went back to the car and returned laden with bottles which he handed through the fence to Drew. Millicent, rummaging in the hamper, called out:

“Is any one else really hungry? Because I'm just bringing one packet of sandwiches.”

Susan, settling herself very deliberately against a tree-trunk, answered, briskly cheerful:

“I want one sandwich and three or four, or possibly five long, cold drinks.”

Bret asked, at her elbow:

“Ginger-beer, lemonade, orange-crush, palato, or something without a label which looks like slightly diluted blood?”

She took a mug from her father and held it out.

“Anything. Here's room, Mother; sit down and have some blood.”

Drew grumbled:

“What
is
that stuff? You know what we should have done was to go on to a hotel in Mudgee and get a decent lunch and some iced lager. I'll have plain ginger-beer, thanks.”

And then, between sips he asked Bret carelessly:

“You heard anything of Colin lately?”

Bret felt Susan's quick anxious glance at him. She'd been there one day at Coolami when a shearer, working westward, had said, not knowing who she was, that it was a sin for a fine little property like Kalangadoo to
be left to go to pieces under a drunken swine like Drew. He knew she was wondering what else he might have heard through the strange gossip of the country which travels so fast—