urled.

'Mrs Hensor had accepted a temporary situation at an hotel in Fig Tree
Mount--the only time I've regretted her absence,' and the musical laugh
seemed to Maule to have acquired a note of exceeding bitterness.
'Perhaps you don't know,' she went on, 'that Mrs Hensor is a sort of
Helen of the Upper Leura--though unfortunately as yet no Paris has
carried her off--I wish there was one bold enough to do it. She had to
be asked to take a change of air because there was rivalry about her
between the buyer of a Meat Preserving Establishment and the chief
butcher at Tunumburra. Fair Helen scorned them both. Result: The two
buyers bought beasts elsewhere and, as you would understand, on a
cattle station, butchers may not be flouted. Though I daresay,' Lady
Bridget added with a shrug, 'if I could have had the butchers in the
house--I draw the line only at Harris--and had sung to them and played
up generally, I might have scored even off Mrs Hensor. But they
wouldn't come until after she had gone and there was no further danger
of a duel taking place outside the Bachelors' Quarters.'

Maule took her cue again and laughed as if the matter were one to jest
about. But as he looked round, his face did not suggest merriment. Nor
for that matter did the landscape. They were riding at the edge of the
immense sandy plain, patched with brown jaggled grass and parched
brambles and prickly lignum vitae--nothing to break the barren monotony
but clumps of stunted brigalow and gidia, a wind-mill marking the site
of an empty well with the few hungry-looking cattle near it.

Now they dipped into a scrub of dismal gidia.

'This is the most depressing country I have ever ridden through,' he
said.

'You don't know what a difference three inches of rain makes,' she
answered. 'Then the grass is green, the creeks are running, and at this
time the dead brambles are covered with white flowers. But it doesn't
rain. There's the tragedy.'

'The tragedy is that you--you of all women should be wasting your youth
and beauty in this wilderness. How long is it going to last?'

She shrugged again, and for an instant turned her face up towards the
sky. 'You must ask the heavens?'

'Meaning, I presume, that like most of the Australian squatters, your
husband hasn't capital enough at his back to stand up against continued
drought?'

'Precisely.' She looked at him, with her puzzling smile.

'But you couldn't have understood his position when you marr