;
light-hearted, but conscious all the time of the hand on the reins, that
was as steel, yet light as a feather upon a tender mouth. They danced
merrily to one side when they met a motor or a hawker's van with
flapping cover; when the buggy rattled over a bridge they plainly
regarded the drumming of their own hoofs as the last trump, and fled
wildly for a few hundred yards, before realizing that nothing was really
going to happen to them. But the miles fled under their swift feet. The
trim villas near the township gave place to scattered farms. These in
their turn became further and further apart, and then they entered a
wide belt of timber, ragged and wind-swept gums, with dense undergrowth
of dogwood and bracken fern. The metalled road gave place to a hard,
earthern track, on which the spinning tyres made no sound; it curved in
and out among the trees, which met overhead and cast upon it a waving
pattern of shadows. Grim things had once happened to Norah in this belt
of trees, and the past came back to her as she looked at its gloomy
recesses again.

They were all silent. There had been few questions to ask of Evans, a
few to be answered; then speech fled from them and the old spell of the
country held them in its power. Every yard was familiar; every little
bridge, every culvert, every quaint old skeleton tree or dead grey log.
Here Jim's pony had bolted at sight of an Indian hawker, in days long
gone, and had ended by putting his foot into a hole and turning a
somersault, shooting Jim into a well-grown clump of nettles. Here Norah
had dropped her whip when riding alone, and her fractious young mare had
succeeded in pulling away when she dismounted, and had promptly departed
post-haste for home; leaving her wrathful owner to follow as she might.
A passing bullock-wagon had given her a lift, and the somewhat anxious
rescue party, setting out from Billabong, had met its youthful mistress,
bruised from much bumping, but otherwise cheerful, progressing in slow
majesty towards its gates. Here--but the memories were legion, even to
the girl and the two boys. And David Linton's went further back, to the
day when he had first driven Norah's mother over the Billabong track;
little and dainty and merry, while he had been as always, silent, but
unspeakably proud of her. The little mother's grave had long been green,
and the world had turned topsy-turvy since then, but the old track was
the same, and the memory, and the pride, w