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within that never again would she allow emotion to reduce her to a spineless receptivity.
    Almost epileptically Mrs Crozier was moving beneath the large pergola on the southern lawn, pruning as she went the ambient roses, so that stems, petals and seed-pods lay in her wake in an untidy trail. The heat had sprung on them at nine, like an angry panther, and was now devouring the midday with unbearable cruelty. Between the shoulder blades of her dress and below the armpits untidy splotches of perspiration had already appeared, and oily rivulets ran down her vague white face with such regularity she had rather the appearance of one weeping.
    â€œEach year I say I cannot bear it, I must go,” she cried pitifully as Elsie approached. “And then a harbour wall breaks or the river has to be dredged so I wait for Bruce’s sake, and another summer is upon me. I think perhaps you are lucky to be going.”
    Their eyes and their hands met in real tenderness, for they liked each other and they said their good-byes with genuine regret. Elsie made many false promises to get in touch with Lesbia, acting the lie out for the mother’s sake, but inwardly really wanting to besevered from the town and all its associations as soon and as completely as possible. Path, grass, trees, shrubberies, blue skirt glimpsed in strips between the slats of the white picket fence and the inanely good-humoured face unhappy beneath its absurd hat. The moment was gone while she tasted it.
    For the second time that morning the nemesis of local transport crashed and rocketed along the stony road. The sun blazed quite wretchedly on Elsie’s bare head, and another little friendship was ended.

V
    June
    T HEIR BICYCLES , if not their hearts, lay linked where they had flung them on the crest of the dune. Festuca and bamboo grass tied the sand-hills into shape, giving promise of a more or less permanent barricade between land and sea. Two miles away, clear in the placid June afternoon, the quarantine station on the cape spilt bungalows, outhouses and offices in profusion down the headland slope, like an untidy vine unpruned by government economies, flourishing recklessly. The island, sky-floating above its shadow, seemed closer than ever. Sea tango’d in lyrical blue, mutations of indigo, ultramarine, cobalt. From this point up the coast it was impossible to see the breakwater that created the artificial harbour or the clumsy hulks of coastal trawlers and freighters that put in twice weekly. But one was aware of their actuality, just as the unseen presence of township, hill, and river made itself felt six miles away. Silence hung in white arcs between island and coast, dune and dune, so that the regular lapping and smacking of water along the beach became an integral part of it.
    Winter breathed lightly on the tropics.
    For a week now there had been temperatures in the higher seventies, cool enough for this part of the world, but freed of all the viscous humidity that often accompanied the same amount of heat in southern places, and lacking, too, the hot winds from the dry plains below the Gulf. It would be like this for weeks ahead, day after day of boringly good weather, cloudless, mild, predictable.
    A foreshortened fishing boat with dirty white sail crossed the circle of their eyes and below it in the reef water sailed its drowned companion. Harry raised one stumpy foot to watch the sand cascade between his toes, but, tiring of this pastime, turned with cavernous yawn to Elsie, who had already commenced sketching, charcoal, art-gum and bottle of fixer higgledy-piggledy on her lap.
    â€œI finished that book you give me last week.”
    â€œWhat one was that?”
    Elsie always felt slightly surprised to hear he could actually read.
    â€œThe one about them bums during the depression years. Now that sounded real to me, because I know jus’ what it’s like trying to get a job when there aren’t none. Somethink like a bloke