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a hundred guinea billiard-table, but because Tom was triumphantly still Tom, and because fifty-seven or not she’d elope with him again tomorrow—
    And this trip, really, was significant. What did it mean, beyond that he wanted to have a good long playwith his new toy, the Madison? She glanced at him rather ruefully, wondering if it could possibly mean that he’d forgiven the country at last for having been her home before he knew her? For having taken both his children? For having been, in the back of his mind for nearly thirty-seven years, a vague, intangible enemy and rival which he must vanquish or die?
    And then she realised that she’d been staring without seeing it at the effigy on the radiator-cap, and she found herself thinking with an irrational confidence:
    â€œBut of course he’ll love it when he gets there—”
3
    Bret, perturbed, fished in his overcoat pocket for cigarettes. Then he thought:
    â€œOh, hell, I couldn’t light it if I had it.” And sat gloomily, his hands still in his pockets, staring at the countryside. Amazing, he reflected, the things that could happen between two people without any words at all!
    Susan—
    You glanced at her and she looked so wretched that you were sorry. So, as was right and natural, you said something, stupid enough, Lord knew, but meant to be comforting, and she looked at you and you looked at her and suddenly things began to happen. A kind of warmth, an expanding, a surprised, relieved, but elusive feeling that everything was really very simple after all—and on her face a dreadful and disturbing joy—
    Then it was gone, like a fitful gleam of sun on a drizzling day. Other things began to drip, drip throughyour mind obscuring a radiance too fleeting and uncertain—
    The Coolami verandah and his own voice speaking from the dark to Jim reading in a patch of butter-yellow light.
    â€œJim, what are you at with Susan Drew?”
    â€œWhat the devil has it to do with you?”
    That, he remembered thinking, while he watched a moth crawl up the page of the book Jim was pretending to read, was the sort of tone he had to expect. So he shrugged and went on deliberately:
    â€œJust that if her father found out about your little affair there’d be a row – and I don’t want a row.”
    Jim flicked the moth away and said angrily:
    â€œWhat do you mean by ‘affair’? And if there was a row it would be my row, not yours.”
    Bret said wearily:
    â€œOh, don’t be an ass.” And then lost his temper.
    â€œAnd you know what I mean. Do you think I don’t know about your idiotic flat in Sydney? And if I know there’ll be plenty of other people who know too—”
    Jim said hopelessly.
    â€œShe won’t marry me.”
    Bret laughed outright and then sobered. The boy was too obviously unhappy to be really amusing. He said shortly:
    â€œWhy should she? She only wants a few sensations.”
    And there it was. That was a conversation you had had. Nothing could alter it. You’d said those things, you’d thought them, believed them, about Susan. Now—
    Even though you didn’t believe them any more, even though you’d come slowly to a very different conception of her, those things which had happened andwhich, therefore, were irrevocably a part of your knowledge of her, remained.
    So many of them. That night when he’d found Jim, tight, in the car. Another time a few days later beside the sun drenched tennis-court at Coolami, when Susan had turned to him suddenly, cool, polite, dangerous:
    â€œYou don’t often play tennis, do you?”
    â€œNot often. But I wanted to be here to-day.”
    â€œI see. Police supervision?”
    â€œPossibly.”
    â€œWill you tell me how you knew about our flat?”
    â€œI found out accidentally. But I’d have known sooner or later. You don’t keep those things dark for long.”
    â€œApparently