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not.”
    â€œI want to ask you something.”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œWill you give it up now?”
    â€œThe flat?”
    â€œYes – and Jim too. The whole business.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause it’s a rotten waste of time – and other things that shouldn’t be wasted.”
    â€œThat’s a matter of opinion.”
    He looked at her curiously.
    â€œDo you know Jim’s in love with you?”
    â€œHe’s often told me so.”
    â€œYou don’t care two hoots for him.”
    â€œI like him very much.”
    â€œDon’t you feel you’re being unfair to him?”
    â€œNo. I don’t feel that.”
    It was then he’d realised for the first time that she wasn’t, anyhow, doing this in the heedless butterfly fashion he’d imagined. He looked at her with newinterest and increased dislike. He saw that she’d thought it all out; that she was playing the game rigidly in accordance with some rules which, rightly or wrongly, she believed to be fair. He was startled; he was even for a moment, through a veritable blaze of resentment, amused by his own reaction. For he felt, suddenly, the whole male sex rear its head in his person and bellow angrily. She was usurping its privileges, endangering its supremacy – actually attempting, heaven smite her, to kiss and ride away!
    And then he’d voiced a threat and she’d answered it – two brief sentences which he’d often found himself remembering since:
    â€œYou’ll burn your fingers.”
    â€œYou won’t hear me yell if I do.”
    A cheeky face it had been in those days. A pair of brown eyes with a gleam in them defying him from beneath her copper coloured hair. He’d gone away into the house rather hurriedly. He’d always suspected that if he had stayed a moment longer she’d have put her tongue out at him—
    He looked at the two heads in front of him. Drew must have been a fine-looking fellow when he was young; even now though the contours of his face had thickened, you could see a good line of cheek and jaw, a glimpse of handsome, if rather arrogant nose. And Millicent, of course, must have been quite bewitching. It wasn’t any wonder when you thought about it, that Susan was – Susan. The vitality of her, springing like grass after rain, the flame of adventurousness flickering fascinatedly towards danger was pure Millicent. The Millicent who had snapped her fingers at Wondabyne and married a bank clerk she’d known for a week—! And yet, in Susan there ran too the streak of obstinacy,the conviction of her own rightness, the arrogance that he’d seen just now, in her father’s nose!
    Life had hammered that out of her, poor kid! He glanced at her, troubled, knowing how much and how unwillingly he’d helped with that hammering. And yet she wasn’t quite flattened out, even now! Judge her as you would, you couldn’t deny her courage. Nor that queer, absurd, heroic honesty she’d taken for her only standard—
    She asked him suddenly:
    â€œWill Kathleen and Ken be at Coolami? When we get there?”
    He said, “Not that I know of.” And added presently:
    â€œDid you see her show?”
    â€œYes – we all went.”
    â€œLike it?”
    â€œYes. Dad bought the one of Wondabyne Pool for Mother, but she doesn’t know yet. For her birthday.”
    And that, thought Bret, was just about as unfortunate a choice as he could have made. Not that he knew, of course, how much of his daughter’s love-affair was bound up in that spot – the spot where two generations of young people from Wondabyne and Coolami had swum, and picnicked and flirted—
    He suddenly found that he didn’t want very much to think of it himself, and he wondered, looking at the long range of mountains now visible, remote, intangible as a bank of cloud across the plain, whether what he felt was