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perhaps it was simply that his passions were more involved than hers, for he found it difficult to keep their relationship within the bounds she laid down. His minor infringements were never more than glances or remarks; the idea of touching her intimately or kissing her appalled him, for he knew were he to do so, she would send him packing on the spot, patient or no. The admission of women to wartime front conditions had been reluctant, and was largely limited to nurses; to Honour Langtry, the army had placed her in a position of trust which could not permit an emotionally draining intimate relationship with a man who was patient as well as soldier.
    Yet he never doubted the existence of the unspoken understanding between them; had she not shared it, and acquiesced to it, she would have disabused him immediately, feeling it to be her duty to do so.
    The only child of wealthy, socially prominent Melbourne parents, Neil Longland Parkinson had undergone the peculiar genesis of that time in that country, Australia: he had been molded into a young man more English than the English. His accent held no single trace of his Australian lineage, it was as pear-shaped and upper-crust as any accent that ever belonged to an English noble. He had gone straight from Geelong Grammar School to Oxford University in England, taken a double first in history, and since his Oxford days he had spent no more than months back in the land of his birth. It was his ambition to be a painter, so from Oxford he gravitated to Paris, and then to the Greek Peloponnese, where he settled to an interesting but undemanding life enlivened only by stormy visits from the Italian actress who functioned as his mistress but would have preferred to be his wife. Between these exhausting bouts of emotional stress he learned to speak Greek as fluently as he spoke English, French and Italian, painted frantically and thought of himself far more as an expatriate Englishman than as an Australian.
    Marriage had not entered his plans, though he was aware that sooner or later it must; just as he was aware that he was postponing all decisions about the future course of his life. But to a young man not yet into his thirties there had seemed all the time in the world.
    Then everything changed, suddenly, catastrophically. Even in the Greek Peloponnese murmurs of war had been sounding for some time when a letter had come from his father: a stiff, unsympathetic letter to the effect that his days of sowing wild oats were over, that he owed it to his family and his position to come home immediately, while he still could.
    So he had sailed for Australia in the latter part of 1938, arriving back in a country he scarcely knew to greet parents who seemed as remote and devoid of love for him as Victorian gentry, which happened to be exactly what they were—not Queen Victoria, but the State of Victoria.
    His return to Australia coincided with his thirtieth birthday, milestones which even now, over seven years later, he found hard to remember without a fresh upsurge of the awful terrors which had plagued him since last May. His father! That ruthless, charming, crafty, incredibly energetic old man! Why hadn’t he sired a whole quiverful of sons? It didn’t seem believable that he had produced only one, and late at that. Such a burden, to be Longland Parkinson’s only son. To want to match, even to surpass, Longland Parkinson himself.
    It was not possible, of course. Had the old man only realized it, he was himself the cause of Neil’s failure to measure up. Deprived of the old man’s working-class background with all its attendant bitterness and challenge, saddled with his mother’s refined preciousness into the bargain, Neil knew himself defeated from the time when he became old enough to form opinions about his world.
    He was into his teens before he realized that he cared for his father a great deal more than he cared for his mother. And that in spite of his father’s indifference to