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“Yes – fine—”

There hadn't been any wheel marks on the road—

“Did you have much rain this morning?”

“Too right. Came down ‘ard for an hour or so.”

Well, that was that. There wouldn't be. Bret put down the two suitcases and lit a cigarette.

“Mr. Drew been doing any more climbing lately?”

The sun was gone now behind the hills. Jungaburra when they both glanced up instinctively at its peak stood out menacingly, a blackish-purple mass against the fading sky. Bill scowled at it and spat into the middle of the wood-pile.

He muttered:

“Break 'is neck up there some day, that's what 'e'll do—” And Bret who, held by some queer fascination, had not taken his eyes from the forbidding summit, felt a sudden chill, a moment of shock almost as if,
with some other sight than the physical, he'd seen Colin's body like a black speck hurtling down into the silent darkness of the trees below—

He picked up the suitcases abruptly, and said with a laugh:

“Let's hope not! Good-night!”

But on the veranda he paused again for a moment and stared at the mountain. It was possible, of course, that Margery's excuses had been genuine, but he doubted it. Too damned glib, he thought, blowing the smoke of his cigarette away from his eyes and frowning still, though unseeingly now, at the darkening skyline.

And if they had been, as he suspected, fabrications, where was Colin? And if he was – well, in a state that called for fabrications, he was certainly not in a state to be where that drift of smoke had shown this afternoon, blue and wraith-like against the bare cliff face—

Strange how quickly the light died in these hill-enclosed hollows. He half turned to go inside and then suddenly in a black wave of weariness and depression put his suitcases down again and leaned his elbows on the veranda rail. Not much to go in to! A houseful of unsolved problems! And yet what could look more peaceful than this place sinking into twilight, the last afterglow fading out of the sky, the frogs beginning to croak down there near the creek-bed, and the mosquitoes, blast them, to buzz!

And to sting! He slapped viciously at his ankle, and a path of light wavered out across the veranda from an open door. He looked up and saw Susan come to the french windows to draw the curtains across them. What little she had on was made negligible by the soft lamplight behind her and he had before the curtains hid
her a momentary impression of strangely arresting beauty. He stood now with his back to the night still looking at the curtained doorway, wondering a little that he should be so stirred. Wondering too, gropingly, because he was not used to introspection, why that stirring of his heart had seemed in some vague way to be at once for the intimate and human beauty of Susan silhouetted against the light and for the dark majestic, and rather intimidating beauty of Jungaburra, black against the sky? Why, too, he did not feel obscurely exasperated with himself because he had had no instant reaction of a righteous, husbandly desire, but rather a more nebulous, queerly satisfying emotion which utterly defied his powers of analysis—

Well, whatever it was it had made him feel good! Good, as one feels after a close game won, or a hard trip ended, or early in the morning for no particular reason at all! So good that surely in such a mood one could really do something about this bothering difficult marriage which had in it somewhere, if one could only find and cherish it, the germ of a beautiful simplicity—!

He knocked at the curtained door.

Susan snatched at her blue frock and then with a faint shrug threw it down again across the bed. She said:

“Come in.”

She turned back to the mirror and went on combing her hair, the light from the lamp standing beside her showed him only vaguely in the glass as he entered,
but she saw the red tip of his cigarette swing out and down as he took it out of his mouth to throw away.

She said casually, still combing:

“I'd go on smoking if I were you. The mosquitoes are fierce.”

The glowing tip described a swift arc in the air and vanished. He came in and closed the door behind him.

“It was finished, anyhow.”

She asked:

“Did you bring the suitcases in?”

He said:

“Lord, I'd forgotten them – they're just out here on the veranda.”

He was out and back with them. She turned with the comb in her hand.

“Would you open mine, please? I want a cool frock. Here's the key.” And as she held it towards him he took her hand and said awkwardly:

“Susan—”

But he found no other words. He had realised with a sudden feeling of helpless and rather crestfallen surprise that a mood is not transferable.

She said:

“Yes?” And he could feel the faint pull of her hand against his grasp. He released it and said, unlocking the suitcase:

“I hardly know. I – well, when I was out there on the veranda I had a sudden feeling that there must be some— Things can't be quite so hopeless—”

He put the open case on the chair and she bent over it. She asked non-committally:

“What made you feel that?”

He frowned, tangled in a genuine and misguided effort to express the inexpressible. He said:

“I saw you
just now – you came to the window—”

She straightened up and looked him over with a slow, contemptuous smile. She said, “I see.” And shook out a frock like a primrose, pale and star-yellow in the soft light. He said angrily:

“You don't see at all – I—”

She bent over the suitcase again, yielding him no more attention than a fleeting glance such as one might give to the protestations of some jam-besmeared small child. He looked down at her bent head flickering with filaments of fiery gold, at her bare arms and shoulders, and he felt a heat and a throbbing behind his eyelids, and a wave of energy almost nauseating in its mixture of anger and desire. He knew, obscurely, that the fury which possessed him was more than half grief for the death of that elusive happiness which had so briefly warmed his heart. He was hurt in a way in which he had never been hurt before, by the discovery that any mood so full of the promise of beauty could be so abruptly and ruthlessly destroyed. He knew even at the moment when he caught her in his arms that he was succumbing to an emotion as primitive and illogical as the temper of a child who smashes a whole toy because one part of it has been damaged. But it was an emotion which, once started, fed on other emotions roused to violence by his senses; the feel of her, and the faint scent of her hair, swept him forward on a tide of reckless and sadistic passion, till he felt her resistance cease suddenly and her arms go round his neck.

He stood quite still, almost as though he were listening. He didn't know why that sudden response had chilled instead of further inflaming him, but he was, instinctively, giving his body a chance to find out for him, as one might for a second or two hold some flavour on the tongue to test its palatableness.

In those moments
of immobility he realised that although they stood there in each other's arms, his head bent over her, his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulder, there was about them an atmosphere of incredible and rather terrifying solitude. She, too, seemed to be listening. There was a sense of aloofness, remoteness, as though they were suspended in some timeless gulf of silence—

Something had arrested in him a passion which no logic had been strong enough to subdue. Turned it off, he thought wonderingly, like a tap or an electric light – flick! Something had made of him, in an instant, a creature as instinctively aware of danger as a wild forest animal, held him as motionless as a stag sniffing the air to find where danger lay!

His arms fell away from her. They stood facing each other warily. A glimmer of understanding came to him and with it a passing moment of exultation. He said:

“Was that the beginning of your play-acting?”

She nodded.

“It didn't work, did it?”

He said slowly:

“Perhaps – I'm not quite so dense as you thought me?” And they looked at each other intently, consideringly, until her face wavered into a smile, and involuntarily he felt his own responding.

She took a long white slip from the suitcase and dropped it over her head. She said, emerging:

“Evidently not. Or possibly my acting might be improved.”

“I wouldn't try if I were you.”

“Why
not?”

“I find that I have a keen nose for it.”

“And you don't like it?”

“I certainly don't like it.”

Her frock was descending like the petals of a gigantic flower. It stopped suddenly and hung suspended, twisting and swinging with the movements of her hidden arms. She said in a muffled and exasperated voice, “Well, I don't know what else to try. This damn thing's hooked in my hair. It might be better to get a divorce now while we're still comparatively decent than later when we'll probably be anything but. For goodness' sake see if you can find where this hook is caught.”

He said, fumbling with a handful of bright hair and flimsy muslin:

“Give me time, Susan. There you are.”

“Thanks.” She pushed her hair back from a face flushed by her struggle with the hook and asked, “Time for what?”

He looked at her for a moment without answering. What he wanted though he did not know how to express it was time for that vagrant and miracle-working sense of beauty to descend on him again. A chance to learn, less impetuously this time, whatever it was that it had to teach; to see more clearly the distant horizon of the land it promised. All that, in his mind, was confused, a shapeless and amorphous loveliness, tantalising, useless.

He said, turning away:

“To think, I suppose.”

Her voice said evenly from behind him:

“That isn't very wise. Your thoughts will take you straight back to Jim.”

He winced
but found himself admitting:

“Well, even that might be – salutary.”

She sat down suddenly on the arm of the chair and her hands dropped limply into her lap. She said drearily:

“It's awfully exhausting talking to you. I can't follow your thoughts. What do you mean by salutary?”

He said shortly:

“One makes mistakes.”

She couldn't resist that. She asked, softly and maliciously, innocent-eyed:

“Not
you
, Bret?”

He moved restlessly and said, “Don't be ridiculous.” And then there was a long, empty and disheartened pause. Susan broke it with a sigh and a not altogether contrite, “Sorry!” but the meagre springs of Bret's self-expression had dried up and he only shrugged, waiting with poised hand for a hovering mosquito to settle on his arm.

Susan said flatly:

“You did get splashed to-day. Do you want a brush?”

He turned and twisted, trying half absently to see the back of his coat and trouser-legs. He was thinking that this journey, with its succession of rather brutal associations, its clinging, pricking memories lying in wait by the roadside like so many Bathurst burrs, was probably being a pretty fair purgatory for her. He said, “I thought I'd got most of it off,” and went on to the realisation that she was going back to a whole lifetime of relentless reminders that she had once made a mistake which had set her off on an endless path of futility—

Well, after all
there it was. She'd made her mistake and she'd chosen her road and he couldn't—

Unless something should happen which could make her feel that the roughest journey had been worth—

She was brushing at his coat with a small ivory-backed brush from her dressing-case. She said in the same flat voice:

“It shows so on this light grey stuff.”

He stood still with his hands jingling money and keys in his trouser pockets till she had finished. He was so deeply tangled in his thoughts that he was not properly aware of them, as one might be, in fighting through some almost impenetrable undergrowth, unaware of the actual nature of the shrubs and creepers in one's way. From one clear painfully acute desire, his thoughts had leapt irrationally into varied and panic-stricken flight. He'd felt suddenly with his whole heart that he wanted her to be happy, and from that wish he'd plunged into a tumult of mad plans and wild surmises. There'd been a kaleidoscopic vision which showed him a kind of toy-shop of the adult female's heart's desire – clothes, and jewels, and cars and trips abroad—

The cessation of her rhythmic brushing woke him up, irritated and ashamed of what he instantly recognised as a collection of ridiculous compromises with an uncompromising situation.

He even realised between chagrin and amusement that among the tinsel and candles of the imagined Christmas-tree delights with which he had proposed to soothe her hurts, he'd actually had a glimpse of a couple of be-ribboned babies – toys of some vague immaculate conception – to assuage an equally vague and uncomprehended “maternal instinct.”

She said:

“That's all right,
I think. I can't really tell in this light. But it's better anyhow.”

He answered without moving:

“Thanks. Is there anything you want, Susan?”

She asked doubtfully:

“Want? How – in what way?”

“Well – in any way.”

He saw the glimmer of a smile in her eyes and said hurriedly:

“You can make your joke in a minute if you like. But for the Lord's sake stay serious just long enough to answer that. Is there anything you want?”

She said slowly:

“You know what I want. If you mean things one buys – no, there isn't anything – thank you.”

He felt his mouth twitch. Susan was, in between her fits of malice and impudence, so carefully and sedately polite! She asked now, picking up a powder puff from the dressing-table and dabbing it rather cavalierly over her flushed cheeks: