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it’s so quiet; it’s so dull.”
    Boston halts as if he has come up against an invisible wall. He will only tell her of the theatre? Speech has no substance, no worth that can be calculated or traded. It must be a gift with form and weight and high value, for what she returned to him had high value indeed. Without an appropriate toll, as it were, he can no longer take the route past the bay, and this is the most convenient route by far. He’ll have to scramble through uncut bush like some fugitive. And then it is still possible he will encounter the Dora woman here in Victoria some day, perhaps years from now. She said she comes to town whenever she can. Certainly she is the sort who would wave from across the street. How can he say, when questioned, that he was too skint to spend good money on a gift? He might as well slap her face, howl insults.
    No, it is not sufficient to tell her stories of the theatre. Perhaps he could work for her, make a fence, chop down a tree or two. But she has Mary and Jeremiah to do such tasks. That Miss Frielan was no one’s orphan niece, not with that Adam’s apple bobbing in her throat, but she did hit upon the truth—obligations, ever obligations. The Dora woman asked that he bring her something. He nodded and so made a deal, and never has he gone back on a deal. That would upset the precarious balance in the world.

Four
    Now that the bottle of sherry is truly dead and gone Eugene has no excuse but to make his way down the hall. He pauses at a closed door. It was here he first saw Dora. She was carrying a mountainous load of sheets, was hung up on a doorknob, was tugging and turning and becoming enchantingly entangled.
    He unwound her gently, gathered up the sheets from the floor, introduced himself and said “Poor pretty bird, to be caught up so.” She was speechless for the first and only time. He apologized for his sudden appearance, though he realized soon enough that it was the remarkable roundness of her eyes that made her appear so startled, so amazed. After that incident he saw her everywhere. It was as if she were multiplied, this Dora Timmons, this hopeless maid of all work. She is touching her finger to her tongue and then to the sad iron, is listening for the iron’s slow hiss. She is polishing the limbs of the bronze at the foot of the stairs, filling small pillows with lavender and sage. She is working the pulleys of the chandelier in the entrance. He holds the lamp while she fills each portion with coal oil, then he pulleys it gently back until it is snug against the blackened medallion, in all as if he were a regular manservant.
    What is it about her that drives him to distraction? She is not a great beauty. And she can barely manage the rightful exchange of conversation, has to be guided with interruptions that would be appallingly rude with anyone else. For Dora talks unrelentingly, her round eyes barely blinking, one story transforming into the next without a breath to allow a comment, a change of subject, a chance to escape. Indeed, Mrs. Jacobsen was correct when she said once that Dora could pinion people with her chatter as expertly as those naturalists pinion insects on a board.
    The best explanation for her appeal, Eugene decides, is that her clothes always seem to be slipping from her, as if nudity is her natural state and her body is always straining toward it. It is her barely laced corsets, the flush to her cheeks, the dramatic panting after exertion, the perpetual half-pinned state of her hair, and that way she comes so close to people and peers into their eyes. She looks, in fact, as if she is forever hurrying from one liaison to the next. She is shocking really, deliciously so.
    How is she faring? At this moment he feels near sick with worry. She had wanted so desperately to join him, but his reason prevailed. They would lose the land if both of them were gone. Squatters would take it. And the goldfields, by all accounts,