point of sympathy. We're quite friends already. Ninnis
and I--he's been in South America, too.'

'You'll find him somewhere about the Bachelors' Quarters, and I'll go
and put on my habit,' she said.

Lady Bridget appeared as Maule and Ninnis were finishing saddling the
horses. Ninnis had stayed near the head station, and was keeping a
sharp look-out for bush fires, he said. Otherwise, there appeared to be
no elements of disquiet. Lady Bridget noticed with surprise that Ninnis
seemed to defer to Maule, which was not his usual attitude towards
strangers. She attributed this to a community of experiences in South
America, and also to Maule's undoubted knack of managing men.

CHAPTER 2

They rounded the lagoon and skirted the gidia scrub. Maule was on a
Moongarr horse, Bridget rode a fiery little chestnut. Maule had already
had opportunity to admire the famous O'Hara seat. They had hunted
together once or twice on the Campagna, that winter when they had met
in Rome. It was difficult to avoid retrospect, but Bridget seemed
determined to keep it within conventional limits. They found plenty,
however, to talk about in their immediate surroundings. Perhaps it was
the effort to throw off the load on her heart that made Bridget gaily
confiding. She drew humorous pictures of the comic shifts, the almost
tragic hardships of life on the Leura--how she had been left
servantless--until Ninnis had got up Maggie from the Lower Leura--when
the Chinamen decamped during the gold rush. She described the
chivalrous SUNDOWNER who had on one occasion helped her through a
week's washing; and Zack Duppo the horsebreaker, whose Christmas
pudding had been a culinary triumph, and the loyalty of faithful Wombo,
who had done violence to all his savage instincts in acting as
house-servant until the advent of the Malay boy Kuppi. She told of her
first experience of a summer out West. The frying of eggs in the sun on
a sheet of corrugated zinc, so intense was the heat. The terror of
snakes, centipedes, scorpions. The plagues of flies and white ants.
Then how, during the servantless period, in utter loneliness and
Colin's enforced absence at the furthest out-station she had had an
attack of dengue fever, and no woman within forty miles of her.

'And your husband allowed this? But where was that barmaid-looking
person who seems to keep house here for stray gentlemen--and, who has
the yellow-headed and blue-eyed little boy?'

Bridget's lip c