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“I’ve always worn shorts.”

“In Sydney, yes. On the beach, yes. But this is not Sydney and it’s not the beach.”

“But it’s a very hot day,” she pointed out.

“You’ll have to live with that, and live with it, I hope, in conventional clothes. Good lord, I trust I’m not a prig, but—”

“You are,” Janet came in quite coolly and quite unemotionally... on the surface, anyway. “You’ve always been a prig. Of all the unnecessary fuss!”

“It’s not unnecessary, and you know it. You know how Mother will react.”

“I know how you’re reacting.” It was still Janet. “Janet, keep out of this, it’s nothing to do with you. You weren’t there, I was.”

“I should sincerely hope so, to be throwing such a filthy mood like this. I wouldn’t like to think it sprang secondhand.”

“I had ten of the stockmen around me, including the new boy. How do you think I felt when Gemma pulled up in—” Bruce gave a disgusted hunch of his shoulders.

“Pleased, I should think,” said Janet, “that your wife has good legs.”

“She’s not that yet,” he snapped.

“No.” Gemma had found her tongue at last. “I’m not that yet.”

That sobered Bruce a little. He turned and looked at Gemma.

“What you do in the house is different,” he said in a milder voice, “but no man wants—well—”

There was silence. No one in the room spoke. In the end it was Bruce who broke the quiet himself.

“It wasn't just what you were wearing, Gemma, it was the juvenile way you were behaving. I pride myself that I have a high status among the men. I make it a strict rule never to fraternize too much. And what do you do? You make a conversation piece of yourself. You follow me out, and which you find me you get out of the car and start skipping a calf. I tell you, I’ll be the laughing stock of my own staff!"

“There was a bride who skipped a calf

To coax a laugh from the boss's staff.”

Janet looked round delightedly, delighted at her own composition.

“Did you know I could write poetry, brother?” she giggled, taking no heed of Jim’s restraining hand on her arm.

However, Bruce took no notice in his turn of his sister. His attention was on Gemma.

“We’ll forget the shorts incident. You were not to know, I suppose. But, Gemma, you'll have to do something, or let us do something, about that beast.”

“Harriet?”

“There you go again! You’re determined to annoy me, aren’t you?”

“No, Bruce, I’m not, and I’m sorry if you think that of me. But what can I do?’

“Seeing you won’t agree to what’s usually done, and should be done, then we’ll take it bush and let it go.”

“It couldn’t survive. I haven’t reared it to be self sufficient. Besides, there may be dingoes.”

“Well, you should have thought of that, shouldn’t you ?” Bruce went across to the comer bar and poured himself a drink.

There was another silence. This time it was Gemma who broke it.

“I’ll take Harriet to Boothagullagulla,” she said.

“What?” Bruce wheeled round.

“There’s welcome on the mat there for Harriet.” Now why had she said such a crazy thing? Bruce would only look contemptuous again.

But Bruce was too angry for contempt.

“Whom do you know at Boothagullagulla ?” he demanded. _

“Chris Mitchell.”

“Since when?”

“Since the day I arrived here. I took the wrong turning.”

“You certainly have a talent for doing the wrong thing, Gemma, meeting the wrong people. Whom else have you met?”

“I’ve met Tim Torrance.” Gemma had risen. Her chin was out. “And if it’s any consolation to you,
I
found him the wrong person, too.”

She was aware that Janet was looking at her curiously, Bruce furiously, Jim with a friendly smile in his eyes.

But she was not waiting to find out what came after the curiosity, the fury, the friendship. There was something to be done at once. Harriet was to be taken at once, taken to Boothagullagulla where there was welcome on the mat.

Before any of them knew what she was doing, Gemma had taken up the car keys, left the house, crossed to the bam, deposited Harriet once more in the back seat of her car, and stalled clown the long track to the signpost with the two arrows.

She drove very fast, she did not want to be caught up by anybody, even by Jim, but by the fourth gate she saw that she was safe and that no one was following her.

She drove on to the arrows, then took the other direction, the track to the Mitchell homestead.

As she cleared its final gate, then closed it behind her, she saw that there was a lot of activity in the barns and stockpens beyond the friendly house with the wide rim of verandah. Coming closer, she saw that beasts were being loaded. She saw the large truck that would take the loads in relays to the road train waiting on The Bitumen, since a monster of the size of a road train could never negotiate a minor track.

She saw the sign on the truck: Territorian.

At the same time she saw Tim Torrance . . . and he saw her.

He was in his old clothes again, oil-stained denims, black sweatshirt. He reached up into the truck and found a rag to wipe the worst of the dust and grime from his hands. He finished off by slithering the hands down the sides of his pants. Then he strolled across to her.

“Good afternoon, Future Mrs. Mannering.”

“Good afternoon, Territorian. Still not trusting your men to do their stint without supervision? Still checking the process for time and expected production yourself?”

“I see the Mannering yeast is working on you already, you’ve achieved quite a Mannering edge. So” ... he had taken out the makings and was rolling a cigarette . . . “the Establishment has won.” He licked the edges of the paper together.

“I wouldn’t be so free with words if I were you, you could be Mannering-snared yourself.” What was there in this man that made her have to answer him back with better, or so she desperately tried, than he gave to her? Gemma thought. “Are you aware,” she dared, “that as a person of means, many means, you are now not quite so unacceptable there as you were before ?”

“Goody-goody!” He deliberately laid down the cigarette and clapped his hands. Big hands. Leather brown. Hard white knuckle bones.

His cool control of the situation on top of one of the worst afternoons she had ever had infuriated Gemma. She heard herself saying things she would not have dreamed of saying before.

“Where you were not quite the Establishment’s dream for Janet, who knows, you could be for Vida . .. Stop, please, you’re hurting me!”

“I could half kill you, you little fool, the flaming rot you say! Look at me,
look at me,
Future Mrs. Mannering, do you think anyone would stop me from taking what I wanted
if I really wanted it
? Do you ?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then know this: I was not interested in Janet Mannering, nor she, if she would only think about it, in me. It was a simple case of elementary rebellion in her instance. Her marrying Jim Willis was another rebellious act, but one, happily, that will pay off.”

“Then it hasn’t.”

“But it will,'' he said confidently. “I like Jim.”

There was a mutinous pause, the mutiny from Gemma.

“You think you know everything, don’t you?" she gritted.

“I know a great deal more than you,” he retorted.

“Next you’ll be telling me that Bruce also only suffered a rebellion when he—that is—”

He did not let her finish. “Yes,” he said brutally, “he did.”

“What?”

‘You heard me. It was a temporary reaction, nothing else. Bruce Mannering doesn't love you, didn’t love you, will not love you. Now how’s that for knowledge?” He had taken up the cigarette again and his eyes behind the blue weave of smoke mocked at Gemma.

“I have nothing to say to you.” She turned.

“You’ve already said it,” he grinned hatefully.

“I brought Harriet to Chris.” She felt she could not bear to follow up the oilier conversation.

“Sick of her?”

“No, but she'll be better here.” Gemma started walking to the house.

In a moment he was walking beside her, a huge man with the easy lope of the horseman, even though his transport now was mostly thirty-six wheels.

“Chris isn’t here,” he said. “Isabel has dragged him down to Melbourne for some reason or other. But you can still leave the child. I’ll fix up a place and tell Ludy.”

“Thank you. I know Chris won’t mind. He said there’d be a welcome on the mat.” Gemma paused, and her lip trembled. “For me as well.” Now why had she added that?

At once she felt his hand, that big brown leather and white-knuckled hand resting on hers. It could have been to help her over a rough patch of the dirt path, but she knew it wasn’t.

“That bad?” he asked quietly.

“Yes . . . no . . . oh, please—”

“Cry if you want to. No one will see. I can stand in front of you. That’s one of the advantages of being a mountain.”

“I’m not going to cry,” she insisted.

“Good for you! Smile, then.”

To her surprise she found herself actually managing a watery grin.

Tim Torrance grinned back.

“Now there’s something to wipe that grin off,” he warned. “If you think you’re rid of me, along with Harriet, you best have another thought. What do you think of this?” He had reached in his stained work pants pocket and removed an envelope.

“Open it,” he said.

Gemma did.

“Read it,” he said.

Gemma did.

“ ‘The presence is requested’,” she murmured aloud, “ ‘at the engagement party of Miss Gemma Glasson of Sydney and Mr. Bruce Mannering of Mannering Park of—’ ”

“Finish it.”

“Of Mr. Timothy Torrance.” Gemma looked up.

She had known about it, she had just hinted something of the soil to him about it, but she still hadn't really believed it. Not this man and the Mannerings. “You wouldn't go,” she said.

“Just wouldn’t I!'’

“You mean you’re going?”

“Why not?” He had taken his hand away from hers again and once more he was eyeing her narrowly behind blue weaves of smoke. “You might remember,” he taunted, “that I clean up well.”

“Is it—Vida?”'

“I’ll tell you that when I look her over," he drawled.

“You’re abominable!” she snapped.

“You get abominable answers when you ask abominable things. No, it’s not Vida.”

“Then the Mannerings.” Janet had said that, had taken it as a matter of course that everyone would feel gratified at the thought of being connected with a Mannering.

“In a manner,” he said shrewdly, “it would be the Mannerings.”

There was a pause.

“I’ll go now.” Gemma turned.

“Yes. See you” ... he looked at the invitation . . . “next Wednesday.”

“It can’t be then,” she said. “Mrs. Mannering isn’t back.”

“She flew in an hour ago. I heard a Cherokee landing on the strip. Either the Flying Doctor or one of her neighbours . . . certainly not Chris . . . gave her a lift.”

“She's back? Then I’d better leave at once.”

“Yes, you’d better.” He gave a taunting smile. “Goodbye, Future Mrs. Mannering. My regards to your mother-in-law. Tell her I haven’t answered the invitation yet but that the reply is Yes.”

“Do that yourself!” snapped Gemma crossly.

“In my uneducated fashion? In my clumsy hand? A thumbnail dipped in tar?”

She did not answer him. Nor did she go back to press a last kiss on Harriet, something she wanted to do very much.

She drove down to the arrows again, turned again, began the ritual of the gates. Then she drove past Bruce’s towards Janet’s, except that to reach Janet’s you had to pass the big house, and this afternoon that was not to be.

Bruce was out signalling to her. Several cars were around. There was an air of activity, an air of importance. Doors were open, windows flung wide. It only needed, thought Gemma a little hysterically, for a flag to be flown, a house flag proclaiming: They’re here. They’re in residence.

She stopped the car.

Bruce ran across to her. “Darling, you had me worried. Mother and Vida are home—the F.D. dropped them at the strip. Mother can’t wait to meet you. Please come at once. You look very nice in that dress, Gemma. But then you always do look nice.” He was peering anxiously, eagerly, even wistfully at her.

... Do I ? Gemma could have asked. Do I, Bruce, in shorts ? But she didn’t.

She got out, straightened her dress, then followed Bruce up the steps, longer steps, a larger verandah, a grander hall. Everything a little more elegant, a little superior.

"Mother is waiting for you in the lounge. In here, Gemma.” Bruce pushed Gemma gently.

Gemma went in.

HOW had Gemma pictured Mrs. Mannering?

She could not have said.

Even though Janet had responded when Gemma had complained that she was being frightened by “Mamma” with a cryptic: “When you see her you’ll call me a liar,” Gemma still had conjured up nothing.

A nebulous figure, always very regal, always very grand, had risen before her, but still nebulous. No face at all.

Now Gemma faced Mrs. Mannering. And Mrs. Mannering was exquisite. Chiselled features. Perfectly groomed, faintly blued hair. Lovely
smiling
grey eyes, and if, in the words of some novelists, there was something else behind the friendly serenity of those smiling eyes, Gemma did not see it. A well preserved figure. An innate graciousness. “A real lady”, Gemma could imagine people saying, for that was what Mrs. Mannering looked. A real lady.

“My dear,” said Bruce’s mother, and her voice was beautifully controlled. She did not rise, but she extended a cool pink cheek to Gemma, and Gemma went and kissed it.

Janet and Jim were already in the room. Bruce had come behind Gemma. A girl... she would be Vida . . . was estimating Gemma.

“Nice,” she awarded at last. “The way Bruce was going on we didn’t know what he would bring home.”

“Vida!” Mrs. Mannering said it once only, but Vida was subdued.

"My ill-mannered younger daughter means you’re a very pretty girl, Gemma,” Mrs. Mannering excused charmingly. “Now come and sit beside me, dear. I’m sure we have a lot to say to each other.”