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leaned over the bed-end and said, rather wistfully: ‘See you, Mike.’
    ‘See you,’ said the diviner, closing his eyes, ‘ah—Jack.’
    Poor Byrnie came out of the room looking rejected.
    But outside in the store Tom was sitting, as usual, behind the counter. And for certain people (people, so far as I could see, who were bent on wrecking their lives, or had done so, like Jack Speed’s father) he had a wonderfully warm and gentle smile. Byrne was one of them. I was moved to see that smile, and Byrne responding. I am soft at the heart, I know, soft at the heart; and they are so ghostly to me, all my fellow men, that such moments, when the reality of them is suddenly there, and brilliant, made manifest by one to another, and by both to me—such moments touch my soft old heart with a pleasure and pain past bearing. There stood poor Byrnie, wearing his twenty-eight years as if they had been eighty, there was so little in his life of hope and promise; and there was elderly Tom, bathing him in the radiance of his young smile. For a moment Byrne looked beautiful.
    ‘He’s a diviner,’ he told Tom, elated.
    ‘I knew,’ said Tom, ‘he was something—not common.’
    ‘You haven’t heard him yet.’
    ‘I’ll wait,’ Tom said. ‘The boy’s weak still.’
    I went away from them, leaving them talking. I went to my house and spoke, as on every other morning, to the wireless. Why did I think, listening to the silence, of our wild garden at home, and of tough frail lilies breaking open the ground, before the earliest rains?

THREE
    Then for three days we saw nothing of him, although from Mary we had a running commentary on his activities. He was deeply depressed, we heard, and would lie on his bed all day without moving. He suffered from headaches, and from fits of shivering, during which the sweat poured from him, leaving him cold as a fish. His skin began to peel. On the third day he shaved himself, taking off a good deal of his epidermis with the hair. His proportions had returned to normal, but Mary found herself unable to form any aesthetic judgement on his face, which, she said, most resembled the flaking ceilings of the Tourmaline Hotel; although not (she added, with a hiss of insecticide) held together with the vomit of flies.
    Byrne fretted, kept unjustly at a distance from his interesting property; to whom, it seemed to us, he had been inexplicably bullying and tedious, and who probably did not care to see him again. On the second night he got drunk, and sang for several hours from his usual platform. Later he staggered into the bar and made a long oration to Kestrel on the subject of the diviner, during which the phrase ‘The desert’ll blossom’ occurred many times. Kestrel replied, when he could: ‘Will you get out of here?’ Byrne then offered to go and live with Jack Speed’s father, at his camp ten miles away, and never set foot in Tourmaline again, if that was Kestrel’s desire. After that Kestrel and Rock laid hands on him, and dragged him off to his bed.
    On the first night or two of the diviner’s sojourn in Tourmaline Kestrel’s attitude to him was charitably neutral. By the fourth night he hated him. He had not, of course, seen him since a few minutes after his arrival, and he was not so rash as to pass any judgement; but when Michael Random’s name was mentioned, the set of his mouth said all that was needed. Said more, indeed, if he had known, than he may have wished; for there were not many people in Tourmaline who did not guess pretty early that he was afraid of the diviner. I think he saw himself deserted, bereft of Deborah, and of Byrne; such a charm the other man seemed to have, even when insensible.
    Deborah was more silent than ever. But one afternoon, not long after a quarrel, I suspect, she took a first sip of some tea she had made, and grimaced, and said to Kestrel: ‘You’ve been here all your life, and what have you given us? Rum.’
    There was no water, he told her. Did