damnation! I wish they would hurry up.” David Bruce stamped his numbed feet upon one of the few reliable planks in the landing-stage, which threatened to collapse under his vigour, and blew upon his hands, rough and contracted by the cold. The only person within hearing, Sonny Shoreman, a lanky youth whose manhood was not yet under way, hung shivering over the side of the black punt that was moored to the rotting piles of the little wharf. His hands were tucked under his armpits. His bottle-green eyes glared miserably up at the horizon, now tinged with a weak glow from the rising sun.

“Are you sure you told them seven o'clock?” demanded Bruce, kicking at a piece of lichen.

“Yes, certain,” mumbled Sonny.

The tide, running out fast, made little wakes round the square ends of the punt, which was a huge coffin-like craft full of furniture and boxes partly hidden under a new tarpaulin cover. The creek, here little more than twice the width of the boat, ran deep between lines of mangroves, the dull green of their stiff leaves relieved but little by the flat yellow berries, which seemed to continue the colour scheme of the clay in solution in the river, recently flooded by the spring rains. Walled up to a high horizon on either side was virgin forest from which a mist, getting lighter every minute, was slowly lifting.

The wharf, the punt, and the two men looked as if they had been dropped from the clouds into the depths of that remote ravine. There seemed to be no way in and no way out. But as the fog shifted they could see, about half a mile along another gully, a small white school and teacher's house, set on the side of a hill.

The eyes of both Bruce and Sonny Shoreman now gazed with fierce interrogation upon those humble buildings. As they looked, the forms of a man, two women carrying babies, and a child—all laden with packages—took shape in the mist. Only occasionally as they came on were they seen by the impatient watchers by the punt, for the road, which was carved round the spurs of the range, lay mostly under cover, and it seemed to Bruce that there passed eternities of biting cold before the welcome sound of voices and the squelching of thin mud made music for his urgent ears.

Indifferent as to the personality of the boss's wife and children, who were to be his passengers, Bruce began to loosen the ropes. When the party finally appeared round a ti-tree clump, and reached the creaking wharf, he turned, raising his cap to Roy Harding, the schoolmaster, and his wife, whom he knew well. Then he looked casually at Mrs. Roland.

He was instantly conscious of his deficiencies.

“The devil! Why didn't I shave?” he growled inwardly.

As they moved on towards him he suspected that Alice Roland was what the washerwomen called a “real lydy,” and he saw that in spite of a hard black hat, and a rather ugly brown cloak, she was a young and very good-looking one too. He saw that she was tall, and that though she carried a baby and a basket hung over her arm she moved gracefully. He had time to notice her good colour, her straight features, and the coils of chestnut hair upon her neck before the party stopped before him.

As Alice turned her grey, day-of-judgment eyes upon him, with a look that instantly judged him and dismissed him from her consciousness, he realized how much she resented being formally introduced to him as to an equal. He did not know that never before had she been presented to any one who looked as unprepossessing as he did at that moment.

He was only too conscious of the marks of his recent short but reckless whisky drinking. His fine brown eyes were strained and blood-shot, his hands red and dirty, his dark hair uncombed, his hat guilty of indescribable disreputableness, his battered dungarees smelling of river mud, tar and stale tobacco.

It would have taken a connoisseur in types to have realized his possibilities. It was not remarkable that on that particular morning Alice Roland failed to perceive them. She saw only the dirty clothes, the unshaven face, the bloodshot eyes, the shrinking manner, all that she had been taught to connect with the name of pariah; and, forgetting for the moment that she was to be dependent on him on an unknown river journey, she barely acknowledged his presence.

Bruce had scarcely time to flush before Mrs. Harding turned to him, trying to ignore the unfortunate manner of the woman she had introduced.

“We have not seen you for three weeks. How is that?” she asked.

Bruce smiled gratefully at her.

“I've been helping Mr. Roland with the house,” he answered quietly.

“Why didn't you come up last night?” she went on.

“We got up late, and it took me till midnight to get the things aboard. We shall have to hurry now. It will take us all our time to get down on the tide.”

He turned as he spoke, and as he did so the child of the party, who had been watching him, stepped up to him. Her eight-year-old dignity was offended at having been ignored.

“How do you do?” she said ceremoniously, holding out a hand that was lost in a dark blue mitten.

Bruce stopped short to look down at her. All he could see of her face was a pair of mischievous and inquiring blue eyes, haloed by a voluminous and floppy bonnet. Before he thought, he had taken that friendly little hand.

the carpenter and Sonny Shoreman were working on the back shed, and Asia was amusing herself, and incidentally Betty and the baby, by playing with the shavings and chips, when she saw an astonishing figure making its way among the rushes and cuttigrass bushes that dotted the slope of the green hill that rose like an overturned basin a few chains away from the back of the boss's house. She sprang to her feet and called upon the carpenter to look.

“It's a lady,” she exclaimed.

He grunted assent.

“A real lady!” repeated Asia. Her first impulse was to rush to tell Alice. Then she remembered.

The astonishing figure came on. Every detail of its appearance was a never-to-be-forgotten fact by the time it paused beside the shed. And surely only magic could have produced that small grand old lady, in a stiff shot silk dress of green and gold, with lovely old lace folded round her shoulders, a funny little old hat of lace and velvet upon her fine grey hair, distinction radiating from every inch of her.

In her hands she carried a card-case of tortoise-shell and gold, two books, and a magnificent bunch of violets.

Her bright blue eyes rested approvingly upon Asia's golden hair, and stared with frank pleasure into the questioning depths of those dilated young eyes.

“It seems to be a case of mutual surprise, my dear,” she began. “I suppose you are Asia Roland.”

“And you must be the fairy godmother,” was the sharp reply.

The old lady laughed.

hand in hand, Alice and Asia paused at the wooden gate outside the double wall of pines.

“Oh, Mother,” whispered the child breathlessly, clutching her hand.

Through the trees they saw hot masses of colour. They heard the deep hum of a billion bees. They sniffed a sensuous air heavy with known and unknown scents. Trembling with anticipation, they opened the gate and stole in a yard or two, only to stand again.

Some gardens, like great masses of complex machinery, arrest and fascinate the intellect, and satisfy one's sense of arrangement, of clockwork management. They have no mysteries, however, no nestling places, no dream-compelling nooks. But inside that phalanx of pines above the river there grew a wonderful garden with all these things; a garden of dreams, a garden riotous with life; a garden of brilliant sunlights and deep shades; a garden of trees that hid the stars and of shy flowers barely peeping from the ground; a whispering garden full of secrets and suggestion; a garden where there was always something more to know.

Trees from England, trees from the semi-tropical islands, and trees from the native forest grew there side by side. There were creamy magnolias, pink and salmon lasiandras, sweet laburnum, banana palms, white trailing clematis, the scarlet kowhai and bowers of tree ferns. Azaleas and jasmine and lilac and mock orange bushes were dotted about at random on the lawns. There were beds and beds of stocks and geraniums, and roses and sweet-williams, and snapdragons and larkspurs, and lupins and lilies, and late narcissi and anemones, and early gladioli. There were jonquils in the grass, and violets and primroses filling up odd spaces everywhere. There were honeysuckled summer-houses and ivy-wreathed stumps, and marble bowls on rough stone pedestals overflowing with creepers. Climbing roses arched the pathways; damp thatched pavilions sheltered fragile ferns. A natural spring bubbled up to form a trickling stream that flowed, hidden by ferns, through a corner and on down the hill in a little gully of its own making to the river.

Everywhere in that garden trees and plants and shrubs leapt at you from the earth, with a wild joy in living, in spreading, in grasping sunward.

In the midst of it, half smothered in creepers, stood a bungalow house, surrounded by broad verandas, every one of them a sweet-scented arbour calling one to pause and stay awhile.

Alice stood still, fighting back tears. She could not then or ever after put into words what that revelation had meant to her.

“Mother, don't cry,” said Asia pitifully. “Are you afraid?”

“Sh!” she answered harshly.

Just then a piercing scream curdled their blood. But before they could move there stepped into the sunlight on the lawn a few feet away a peacock, with his tail outspread. He stood still as he saw them, proudly displaying his glory to their astonished eyes. A peahen who had followed, stopped too, regarding them curiously.

Asia felt queer. She was certain now that by some invisible magic they had been spirited off to Fairyland.

The creaking of a wheelbarrow on the path broke the spell. Mrs. Brayton came into view and saw them.

“Oh, there you are,” she called, dropping the barrow. “What is it? Oh, the birds. They won't hurt you. Come on.”

She wore an old and grimy Holland dress, short to immodesty, her son declared, showing in full her frayed elastic-side boots and thin legs. Her little hands were lost in thick leather gloves, her head hidden in a straw hat tied under her chin. Anything more unlike the fairy godmother of the week before could not be imagined.

“I'm afraid we have come too soon,” began Alice.

“Indeed, you have not. I have expected you for an hour. Did you think to find me dressed up, and sitting in my drawing-room with my hands folded, wasting time waiting for you? Well, you were wrong, you see. Now, will you like to see my flowers?”

“Yes, please,” said Alice warmly.

The old lady saw they were overcome. It was one of the delights of her life to spring her house and garden upon the unwary. Many an unsuspecting curate, fresh from England, and sore at his exile into the northern wilds, had landed at that garden gate to be astounded, and humbled, and grateful, and stimulated and educated by turns. Many a derelict from a titled English home, driven by degeneration to the gum-fields, had strayed there, to get once more a glimpse of what he had left behind, to have self-respect for an hour again, and to learn what was happening in England from the lips of an Englishwoman, whose voice stirred up a horde of good intentions, destined only to pave hell as of yore, as well she knew. But none the less her house and her news and her time were for every one who, passing by, came in to beg a share of them.

“You must have flowers to take home,” said Mrs. Brayton, “all you can carry, and you can pick them yourselves, anything in the garden.” Detaching a pair of scissors from her belt, she handed them to Asia. “There, my dear, you cut them off, nice long stalks, but don't pull at them to disturb the roots.”

“Oh, she won't——”

“Yes, she will do it quite rightly. She can't hurt anything. My garden belongs to everybody. I am particular about my conservatory. I don't give things out of it, and I notice that it's always getting blights and insects. I sup-posesuppose that's a judgment on my selfishness. You are not picking anything.”

“I can't believe that I can. It doesn't seem real,” said Alice nervously.

“Oh, nonsense! This isn't a public park. Help yourself. Asia, show your mother how to pick flowers.”

The child got the spirit of it first. She rushed about in ecstasy, pointing at things she wanted, and looking at Mrs. Brayton for approval. The approval never failing, she began to believe it was all true, and helped herself. Alice followed more timidly, not taking the biggest and best things, as Asia did, till her arms, too, were full.

“Oh, Mother, isn't this lovely?” Asia ran up to her with as many kinds of flowers as her arms would hold.

Mrs. Brayton's eyes grew misty as she looked at them. It was obvious to her that life for them had lacked many simple joys.

“What can we do with them all? We have nothing to put them in.”

“You have bath-tins and buckets,” said the old lady. “Use them.”

Alice smiled into a cluster of tea roses.

Mrs. Brayton led the way to the front veranda.

“Asia, rub your boots well,” said her mother fearfully.

“You can take them right off, my dear, and keep them off till you go, if you won't catch cold. I love children in their bare feet.”

This was another shock to Alice, who began to realize that her notions of propriety would never be any use here. Asia took her boots off on the veranda mat, and then fearfully, reverently, as men tread before the shrines of their gods, they entered by a wide-open French door a large library and music room, which opened through an archway upon a rose red drawing-room.

Before they had time to get more than a first blurred vision, Mrs. Brayton rang a little bell, and there appeared in the doorway a prim and aged maid in a black dress, with a spotless cap and apron.

“Tea, please, Mary. And will you help me to carry out these flowers and put them into water.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Instantly Alice felt as if she were back in London. It could not be a dream. She must be there. That particular kind of “Yes, ma'am” in the wilds of New Zealand was absurd, a figment of the imagination. She did not know that many a man from the gum-fields, that even Bruce, had felt as she did about it.

“Sit down,” said Mrs. Brayton, “and excuse me for a few minutes. I must clean myself.”

Left alone, Alice and Asia stared in wonderment about them. Facing them, on a pedestal in a corner by the archway, stood a cast of “The Winged Victory” of Samothrace. Round the walls, above the rows and rows of books, hung engravings of the great cathedrals of Europe. An open fireplace in plain brick took up a quarter of the wall opposite the drawing-room. On the mantelpiece was a row of old brass candlesticks, and on the hearth heavy old brass irons. Set straight before it was a deep faded lounge, on which a whole family could doze and dream. A grand piano filled in one corner. Bowls of flowers, and bronzes, and busts of great musicians stood upon the top shelves above the books. There were well-worn Persian rugs upon the dark, polished floor.

The drawing-room was an old-fashioned, over-crowded treasure house of things dear to the searcher after the choice and the antique. Rare engravings and quaint water-colours, in tarnished gilt frames, hung on the faded pink walls. There were cabinets full of china and glass, of old silver and jewellery, of enamelled and metal snuff-boxes, of fans and curios. Valuable Chinese and Japanese porcelain vases stood in corners and against the walls. Elaborate beadwork fire-screens hung from the white marble mantelpiece, upon which stood four great silver candelabra.

there, now, we begin to see them,” said Mrs. Brayton.

She stood with Alice, Asia and Roland on a cleared track in the gap beside Mt. Pukekaroro. They had come up through the fern and the scrub and the outer fringe of bush by way of the cleared line cut for the tramway. They had passed one gang of men laying rails, and they now stood at the place where the low bush ended and the real forest began, with an open avenue before them, cut as far as they could see down a slight incline through a glorious tangle of undergrowth. The sunlight, sneaking through the tree-tops, picked out spots upon the mauled and trampled ground, and on the trunks of trees, and in the vivid heads of giant ferns.

With a catch of her breath, Alice saw, towering up out of the green depths on either side of that open way, row upon row of colossal grey pillars, seemingly as eternal as the hills, losing themselves above in a roof of impenetrable green. The pungent smell of their innumerable little cones mingled with the heavy smell of banks of moss about their roots. A faint sound of the morning breeze stirring in their topmost fringe of leaves leaked downwards.

“There!” Roland put down the luncheon baskets he was carrying, and waved his hand airily at them. “Best bit of bush in the colony. Nothing to beat it outside of California. Those trees have stood there thousands of years. Might have stood there thousands more.”

“And you are going to cut them down!” exclaimed Alice, as if it were sacrilege.

“You bet I am. Great job too. Takes some tackling.” He was proud that he had dared to stake everything he pos-sessedpossessed on this great adventure. He knew that he was being discussed in Auckland business circles as a bold spirit and as a coming man.

“I've told you what I think about it,” said Mrs. Brayton.

“Rot!” laughed Tom Roland. “What would you have people live in in this country? Timber is cheaper than bricks. Those trees make houses for the poor. Somebody has to cut 'em down. Look at the people who can own their own houses in New Zealand. Why? Cheap land, cheap timber. Something you don't have in England. And you talk sentiment to me! Pooh! Come on.” He took up the baskets.

After they had moved on a little way they heard the reverberating sounds of axes swung by a gang of men working on ahead.

Alice walked silently, Asia as usual holding her hand, and gasping and pointing at intervals at things that thrilled her.

They had now been three weeks at the bay, and Alice had learned that there was a village at Kaiwaka, two miles past Mrs. Brayton, where six houses, a church and a store stood within sight of each other. She had learned that there was a fortnightly mail. She had learned also that there were possibilities in Tom Roland's scheme, that there would soon be a village at the bay, with its store, and some day even its school.

She had learned, too, that she might be able to live on by the river without having daily visions of premature decay and death. She was twenty-eight, and healthy, and she knew she would take some killing. She had begun to see the sense of trying to fit in, of readjusting her sense of values, of learning the language that belonged to the mountain and the river.

On two afternoons in the last week she had taken the children to the top of the green hill behind the house, and had sat under the straggly cabbage trees. She had looked across the gully at the block of pines, and had pictured the old lady in the garden within, and the peacocks strutting on the lawn. And she had looked down the river through the gap at the low hills, indigoed in the vista beyond, and at the walls of forest to the north, and at the mountain cutting a great wedge out of the eastern sky.

Then her thoughts came back to the babies pulling grass beside her, and to Asia making daisy chains. She saw how they loved it, and because it was going to be good for them it had to be good for her. She was determined that, outwardly, at least, she would be cheerful about it. She knew that Mrs. Brayton was the chief factor in this effort at reconstruction. Already she loved the old lady with a passion born of years of longing for some kindred spirit.

As she walked, crumbling twigs and chips underfoot, Alice felt around her the stirring beginnings of things. No one could have realized that invaded silence of ages, have seen those violent assaults upon eternal peace, without feeling that it was a big thing to break in. She heard Tom Roland talking of tramways, of engines and trucks racing along the slopes, of dams and waterways, of mills and ships, as he outlined once more his plans for future greatness. And there was something powerfully arousing about it all. It had fired Mrs. Brayton. It began to fire her.

The ringing thud of axes, the crackle of disturbed undergrowth, the sounds of voices and the clanging of iron tools grew louder. At the end of the avenue they came out upon a clearing beside the rocky bed of a shallow creek. It was here they were to see felled one of the kauri trees.

Roland explained that this was to be the site of a camp and tool and truck depot. Four tents stood to one side. Near them a group of men were putting up the framework of a wooden building. Great piles of rough hewn sleepers were stacked up here and there. Logs had been jacked to one side, and the earth flattened by their rolling over it. The ground was covered with chips and small branches crushed into the loose soil. Men in all kinds of singlets and dungarees were sawing logs, squaring sleepers, clearing away the wrecks of tree heads, and making ready to dynamite a large stump.

“There's our tree,” said Roland, pointing straight across the clearing at a grey pillar, exposed against the forest background. “Biggest we've tackled yet. It's right in the way of the tramway.”

They saw men at its base blocking an unsightly gash upon its farther side. Roland laid down his baskets.

“They'll be ready soon,” he said, moving forward to a group of men, whom he hailed with a free and easy air.

With varying degrees of accuracy of aim and thoroughness, they all sent a hand to their heads or caps as they caught sight of the women of the party.

Alice saw David Bruce standing some distance away, guarding the dynamite. Her eyes rested on him for some seconds. Asia saw him too.

“Mother, there's Mr. Bruce,” she said, as if she were claiming an old friend.

“I see,” said Alice frigidly.

“My dear,” broke in Mrs. Brayton, “do you see that thin, fair man talking to your husband? He's the son of an earl. There are some queer mixtures in this bush. Just look at this face nearest us. Roland says he is the most reckless blackguard he has ever known. They call him Shiny. They must be a sweet family to manage. My God! What has he done?”

The man named Shiny had suddenly dropped his axe, and doubled up with a violent volley of oaths.

“Oh, he's hurt,” cried Alice, and to the astonishment of Mrs. Brayton, she ran towards him. She saw blood gushing from his thick boot. “Tom,” she called. But already two men had reached his side, and Alice heard Bruce's name shouted sharply.

Shiny stopped blaspheming as he saw her.

“Pardon, ma'am,” he said gruffly, as he began to undo his boot.

As Alice stood helpless, with no notion as to what to do first, but with an instinctive feeling that she ought to help, David Bruce ran up. She saw the men gathered round make way for him, and she saw that he was the man for that emergency.

“Rags,” he commanded.

“And salt,” added Shiny.

Two men started for the tents. Bruce knelt down, and as he pulled off Shiny's boot a jet of blood shot out from the gashed foot. Alice turned her head away. Then she forced herself to look back.

“I have clean towels,” she said to Bruce.

“Yes, please,” he answered, looking up at her, as he closed the wound with his hands.

As she hurried to the luncheon baskets she wondered if the look in his eyes had been meant for approval, and she knew she hoped it had been.

By the time she reached him the men from the tent ran up with a bundle of rags and the kitchen bag of salt. The wounded man, who had sat up throughout, reached for the latter, and dived his dirty hand into it.

“Lord! man,” exclaimed Bruce.

“Best thing to stop bleedin',” answered Shiny defiantly.

“Yes, if you can stand it.”

Bruce took off his sock, and Shiny rammed the handful of clean salt into his gaping, squirting wound. They saw him clench his hands, but he never made a sound. Even the boss looked at him with admiration.

Alice leaned down with her towels.

“Thank you,” said Bruce, looking up again into her face. He made a pad of one towel, cut the other into strips, and rapidly bandaged the foot and doubled up the leg.

Alice walked back to the place where Mrs. Brayton stood holding Asia's hand. Somehow the accident had affected her feeling for the place, had put a touch of kinship into it that was not there before.

“That man put a handful of salt in that cut, and never groaned,” she said hoarsely.

alice started back from the kitchen fireplace. The dusk was closing a late autumn day. When the sounds outside became more clearly defined she turned towards the door with a breath of relief. She knew the footsteps very well.

“You sent for me, Mrs. Roland?” Bruce's form filled up the small doorway.

“Yes.”

Alice stood back in the shadow. It was apparent that in a month or two she would have another child, and, as the attitude of mind that had been imposed upon her demanded that women be ashamed of motherhood or of its signs before the event, and blissfully idiotic about it immediately afterwards, she blushed whenever a man came near enough to see her. Bruce, who had seen previous blushes, guessed that she was blushing now.

“There were two men here this afternoon, looking for my husband,” she went on. “I didn't tell them how long he would be away. Did you see them?”

Bruce felt that she was frightened. He knew something unusual had driven her to send for him. It was the first time she had ever done so.

“Yes, I did,” he replied. “They went off some time ago. That's all right.”

Just then his eye rested on a heavy iron camp oven set on the hearth. When he had seen it that morning it had stood in the woodshed.

“Mrs. Roland,” he said sharply, “are you lifting that oven about?”

Alice was so amazed at his tone that she answered meekly “Yes.”

asia, it's time you went to bed.” Alice did not say it convincingly, for she dreaded being alone. “Yes, Mother,” said the child, understanding that it was not an order, and making no attempt to move. She sat in a tangled attitude on the narrow sofa, her head bent low over a dilapidated Boys' Own Annual that Roland had bought for her at an auction sale in Auckland, her brains on fire with the adventures of a party of explorers in The Silver Canyon.

The glow of the open fire, rivalling that of the kerosene lamp, played on the bare walls of the front room. It had been lined, but was still unpapered. A plain, oblong table, with a flowered cover, stood in the centre. The floor was now covered with a new linoleum of much too large a pattern—Roland's choice—but there were no rugs. On the narrow mantelpiece was a row of Alice's books, Tennyson, Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Cowper's poems, Drummond's Ascent of Man, Butler's Analogy, Paley's Evidences, The Pilgrim's Progress, and some children's books—Line Upon Line, Peep of Day, and more modern ones issued by the Religious Tract Society. There were no knickknacks anywhere, and no pictures. Alice's piano, which seemed to fill up half the room, suggested magic rather than plain fact.

Alice sat with a heap of mending beside her, but she was so restless that she could hardly sew. She had been getting more and more wrought up each day since her husband had left for Auckland. On his previous absences she had been nervous enough, but she thought that as time went on she would get used to it. Now the responsibility of the money imposed upon her nervous condition was driving her fast toward hysteria. The appearance of the tramps that day was the last straw. After they had gone she worked herself into a fever fighting her desire to send for Bruce. The mere sight of him, she felt, would steady her nerves, and she wanted to be sure that he was about. But she did not want him to know that she was frightened, she did not want him to offer to do anything. She only wanted to be sure that he was there, within reach.

For over an hour she had kept going to the window to look for him, but not once had she caught a glimpse of him. Finally, unable to resist the impulse, she had sent Asia after him, and had then dreaded his appearance, not knowing what she could say. His words about the tramps had somewhat reassured her, but his words about the camp oven had charged her with another kind of excitement. It seemed to her to be such an intimate incident. He had assumed the right to take her in hand, and she knew she had been helpless to resist him. After he had gone she sat down, sick and trembling, her nervousness increased. She thought of sending to ask Mrs. Brayton to come down to stay with her. But she felt this would be an appalling confession of cowardice. She knew she would have to be alone again and again, and she told herself she had to get used to it. But, as the evening wore on, she wondered how she could possibly get through another sleepless night.

She jumped up suddenly, walked to the front door, opened it and looked down upon the starlit river, and up at Pukekaroro, looming dark against the moon. Then she heard the sound of Bruce's violin. She stood there listening till the music stopped. Then she found that she was very cold. She shut the door and put more wood on the fire.

She tried the experiment of repeating hymns and religious poetry. But she was terrified to find that the thought of God failed to help her. It grew late, but she said nothing more about Asia's going to bed. When it was nearly eleven, however, the child got up of her own accord, kissed her mother good night, lit her candle, and went out through the kitchen to her little room, which opened off it. The one window opened towards the back with a view of the bare hill.

Asia did not undress. Instead, she put on an old astrakhan jacket, and knelt down to pray that her mother would cease to be afraid. Then she took a dark blanket off her bed, wrapped it round her legs, and sat down by her open window, gently pushing it open further till the lower sash was up as far as it would go. She meant to watch for David Bruce. Since she had begun to read the Boys' Own, her mind had been a ferment of adventure and romance. Men were wonderful beings, she thought. She was full of exaggerated notions of their strength, their beauty, their tenderness, their care for women. Precocious beyond her mother's imagining, she knew also that there was something else, something mysterious, that made them creatures to be looked up to, feared and obeyed.

She had known the first night that she had seen David Bruce in the back yard that he was there to do something for them, and she instinctively felt that he was in some way taking the place of Roland. She knew he must be cold and uncomfortable, and she immediately made of him a hero. With his big body, and his kind eyes, and his gentle ways, and his unafraidness, he seemed to her the very incarnation of all the heroisms of her favorite heroes in the Boys' Own. And because he was a hero she had to be the heroine. And she would rescue him from the cold. This night she meant to make him come in to her bed, while she indulged in a riot of sacrifice by sleeping on the mat. So she sat watching for him.

Bruce crept cautiously by way of the cliffs to the paling fence at the back of the yard, and sat down on a low stump. From the store he had seen the light still burning in the front room, and he was afraid lest Alice should look out. He was not at all easy in his own mind about the money. There was more than one man in the boss's employ to whom £400 would be a formidable magnet. It would be easy for any one of them to get away to one of the great northern gum-fields, lie low for a time, and then ship by way of a timber vessel to Australia. So Bruce had let the impression gain ground among the men that he was staying at night in the boss's house on guard. They all knew he was armed.

This night Bruce was very weary, and he wondered how he was going to keep awake. He sat on till he was sure Alice must have gone to bed. Then he made his way slowly round the fence to the side gate and got safely into the yard without having made a sound. He started as he caught sight of Asia at the window, and shook his fist at her. He could see her mouth opening and shutting silently, and her fingers beckoning, but he waved her back.

Just then, as she sat in a frenzy of fear over the dying coals in the front room, Alice felt there was somebody about. With a courage born of sheer desperation, and to save herself from screaming she jumped up, moved to the front window and pushed aside the blind. But there was nothing to be seen in the moonlight but the things that were there by day. Then she walked quietly out into the kitchen. Asia, hearing her, gasped and gesticulated wildly at Bruce, who did not see her as he turned to pick up his rug.

Alice went straight to the kitchen window, and pulled aside the blind. She saw the figure of a man crouching in the yard. She gave one frenzied shriek, and fell in a heap on the floor.

Sick and trembling, Asia rushed to unlock the back door. Bruce almost fell over her.

“Light a candle,” he cried, as he dashed into the kitchen. By the light of it he gathered up Alice's contorted body, carried her into her room, and laid her on her bed. “Get me a pencil and paper.”

Asia ran to get her own candle, found her pencil and a piece of a paper bag, and hit her big toe badly as she ran back to him. He almost snatched the things from her and dashed off a note.

for a week Alice hovered between life and death, knowing nothing. In that time there was a hush upon the bay. Bruce had stopped punt building on the beach, and hammering and clanging in the blacksmith's shop and on the tramway. The men were careful not to call or shout within hearing of the house on the cliffs.

Alice learned by degrees afterwards how everybody had rallied round her, and how well she had been cared for. Mrs. Brayton had sent Eliza King for Betty and Mabel, prepared to keep them all with her indefinitely. Dorrie Harding came at once with the messenger Bruce had sent by the river, and she and Mrs. Brayton together made broths and jellies equal to anything a city hospital could have produced.

It was well in the second week before Alice dimly realized that Bruce was one of the people who moved about her in that misty world of fact that encompassed her bed. She was not surprised to see him, or annoyed to see him, or glad to see him. She accepted him as she did the others as part of that reality that her mind struggled at intervals to catch, but always failed to grasp with any degree of clearness. She was a body only. She felt merely pillows moved about her, warmth put to her feet, aches and pains soothed, wetness and dryness upon her skin, an interminable succession of teaspoons put into her mouth.

At the end of two weeks she had her first lucid moment. She clearly saw Dorrie Harding in the chair beside her bed.

“You here,” she whispered faintly.

Dorrie leaned forward, smiling.

one afternoon, a fortnight later, Alice sat in her rocker by the sitting-room fire, with Asia reading the inevitable Boys' Own on the sacking mat beside her. She was now able to be up most of the day, and was so much better that Mrs. King had left to go to another case. Mrs. Harding had gone this evening to have dinner with Mrs. Brayton, leaving Asia in charge of her mother. Roland had been all day in the bush, but was expected back for tea, which Dorrie had left prepared in the kitchen.

Alice had not recuperated as well as Bruce thought she ought to, considering the great care and attention she had received, and he wondered what it was that was holding her back. He knew that she had asked many questions about her illness, but he gathered that Mrs. Harding had successfully kept the real facts from her. He thought it hardly likely that she was grieving over the baby to the extent that her nerves indicated.

With that inconvenient insight that so many introspective women possess, Alice suspected that she had not been given the true facts of her illness. As she grew better she began to wonder what they were hiding from her. She knew now that David Bruce had been at the house a good deal, even though she had no clear memory of him. She knew that he still came, for she heard his voice in the kitchen in the evenings. But she had never seen him, and she was appalled to find out how much she wanted to see him.

In those two weeks, as she sat at the sitting-room window, she had looked for him about the spit and the tramway. Once when she had seen him near the store, she had felt the quick fever in her veins painting itself upon her face and neck. She sternly fought these relapses. She told herself she must not allow any sentimental feeling about his connection with her illness to drive her into thinking of him. Again and again she repeated her little formula about not beginning. Then she would get angry with him for ignoring her now that she was well. As a matter of common courtesy, she argued, if not as a doctor, he should have come to see her. Her illness should have brought about a natural acquaintance between them. He should have seen that, and should not have held her to her mistake. It was his opportunity to ignore it. The natural antagonism between these two views wore on her nerves.

As she sat by the fire with Asia, it occurred to her that she had not had an opportunity of talking to her. The more she thought of it the more she saw significance in the fact that she had been alone very little with her. Of course the child had been very useful, and had worked unceasingly. Emotion stirred her as she looked down at her. Was she imagining, or did Asia look different? Had she been able to enter into the atmosphere of serious illness to any degree? Alice remembered the curious expression on her face as she had stood beside her bed. Suspicion entered her mind. She determined to find out what she knew.

“Asia, how long was Dr. Mount here when I was ill?” she asked suddenly.

She saw the child hesitate, and answer without looking up:

“I don't know, Mother; I didn't see him come.”

“Did you see him at all?” demanded Alice.

“No—I—they didn't let me in.” Asia began to feel uncomfortable. She did hope her mother was not going to ask her any questions. She was not quite sure now what they had told her to say. And it was one thing to be told to say it, and another to look into her mother's eyes and lie to her.

“Were you asleep when I got ill?” pursued her mother.

alice sat on a box in the back garden looking down the river. The sun had set, but opaline ghosts of clouds still trailed their “ravelled fleeces” across the pale lemon of the western sky. The cliffs of the river gap were fast merging into the wall of haze that deepened and spread from the horizon. The river ran silently undisturbed by leaping fish. The wekas were just beginning to shriek from the forest.

Alice drew her heavy cape around her, for the tang of winter was still in the air. She had seen that day the glow of a yellow kowhai in the bush, and had heard the croaky call of a tui trying out his throat in readiness for his flute song on the first real spring day. Bees had buzzed about their new garden, and Asia had declared that morning that she had found the first daffodil bud in her own little flower-bed. But the promise of spring had failed to inspire Alice. There was no response in her as she sat there looking down upon the river. She had spent a winter of glorious discontent.

The more she had tried to prop herself against her gods, the more she had tried to console herself with fixed principles, the more inadequate she had found them. They had not kept her from looking through the windows to watch for David Bruce as he came and went along the paths about the bay. They had not kept her from listening to his violin. They had not kept her from flushing when she met him unexpectedly.

The biggest cause of her uneasiness was that she had begun to question the verities. If you live beside a river sooner or later you have to. You can't help sitting beside it, and listening to it, and watching the water go by. And then you wonder idly where all the water comes from and where it goes, and when it began to run and why, and if it will ever end and why. And your thoughts run with it and change with it. And you go out at night to look at the stars reflected in the dark depths of it, and then you look up at the stars themselves, and you ask when and why again. And little by little you wonder if all that men have said about them is true, and who the first man was who said it. And you would like to be quite sure that he was inspired by God.

And that brings you to God. Is he up there, and what does he look like? And when you begin to wonder what God looks like you have reached the half-way house to the heights of scepticism. He must look like something or somebody, but whom and what? And does he really hear your prayers, and does he really care? And if he does not hear your prayers, what then? And if he does not care, what then?

Alice had reached a stage of mental convulsions when she no longer clearly saw God in His heaven and all right with the world.

Other fears, too, had been closing in upon her, fears that she could not crush or sweep aside. She had never been really well since her illness in the autumn. Lately the conviction had grown upon her that the first blow had been struck at her fine health. She was getting nerves. She became more and more nauseated by the terrible vitality of her husband. It was being stimulated this very day, she knew, by the sportive widow who had recently bought the Hakaru pub. Roland had not disguised the fact that he was going to see her. She was a good sensible woman, be said, and he wanted her to pick out likely men among her customers, and send them to him for jobs. Alice had not remarked aloud that it took a good many visits to arrange this simple matter.

Then, for two weeks now, she had feared that she was going to have another child. She had not expected to feel so badly about it. She had married knowing she would have children, that it was her duty to have them, that God approved of large families, that she ought to love and welcome all her children, and that she ought to feel a renewed exaltation in the knowledge that another was to come. But now she did not feel any of these things. She felt only a dumb rage, a sick helplessness, a fierce rebellion. And she had wondered more than once if it really was as wicked as she had been told to rebel against the word of God.

Everything immediately around her this Sunday conspired to drive her to distraction. The children had been unusually exasperating, and Asia, who could have helped her, had been away, Alice did not know where, the whole afternoon. She had merely asked her mother if she could go for a walk along the beach. For some time Alice had not been alarmed about her, thinking she might have gone to Mrs. Brayton. But now it was dark, and she knew the old lady would not have allowed her to stay so late. She fidgeted on her box, straining her ears for the sound of returning footsteps. Her fear soon got the best of her. She began to walk round the house listening and looking, and feeling worse every minute.

On her second round she stopped, her eyes turned towards a new shanty standing by itself at the foot of the green hill, well away from the back of the men's kitchen. Bruce had moved into it only a few days before. Alice had learned from Asia, whom she had allowed to go to see it, that he had a “carpet,” a stretcher bed, books, tables, a cupboard for his clothes, and a special box for his violin. She had looked so often in its direction that she hoped no one had noticed. She could not tell now whether he was home or not, for she knew that his western window had a thick green blind.

As she looked she felt a sudden desire to go to him, and then an equally strong determination to fight this desire. She looked upon her attitude to Bruce that winter as her one great achievement. Although it still upset her inwardly to meet him, she felt that outwardly she had gained in poise. She had met his naturalness with what she thought was naturalness in return. She had been pleasant, but she never relaxed her vigilance as to the beginning. She had never asked him in. She never let conversation linger. She always assumed that he had urgent business with her husband. She knew that he must think it extraordinary that she had never referred to her illness, that she had never thanked him for what he had done for her. She had never sent for him. She had never stayed in the sitting-room on the evenings when he had worked with her husband. It tortured her to think that he must despise her, but she saw no other way of going on.

Now, however, the temptation to send for him grew more irresistible every minute. The better to fight it she went inside. She paced restlessly from the kitchen to the front room and back again, torn between her fear that something had happened to Asia and her craving to go for the man who could best help her. She looked into her room to see that Betty and Mabel were safely asleep, and had turned into the kitchen again, distracted, when Asia rushed in, bursting with excitement, her eyes aflame with adventure, far too preoccupied to notice the state of her mother's nerves.

“Oh, Mother,” she panted, “we've found a cave, and Maori shells and bones, and this beautiful bit of greenstone.”

But there was no response to her enthusiasm. Alice's reaction was swift and overwhelming.

“We!” she said sternly.

Asia felt a sudden chill. “It was only Reggie Broad, Mother. I met him on the beach. We explored some bush, just like a real party. It——” But the words froze on her lips. She could no longer face her mother's eyes.

“Reggie Broad went with you into the bush!”

With a sinking feeling Asia felt that it was an awful accusation. Reggie Broad was a coarse, rough boy, the son of the Kaiwaka storeman, who had recently come up from Auckland. Alice realized his type, but to Asia he was a mine of information and amusement. They had had a thrilling and innocently joyous afternoon. That was all she knew. She faced, her mother squarely.

“We didn't hurt anything,” she said.

Alice moved a step towards her. She was now thoroughly unstrung.

“How long were you with him?”

“Oh, I don't know, Mother,” she stammered, “since dinner.—I—we didn't do anything wrong.”

“You've been for hours in the bush with that boy!”

Asia choked as her mother seized her by the shoulder, and hurried her into her own room. Then she left her, shutting the door behind her, only to return a moment later with a strap. As the child saw the horrible thing that was about to happen she became faint.

“You wicked girl,” cried Alice, grasping her arm. “How could you go away like that with that boy? You should have come to ask me—I don't know what's come over you lately—you must not do things unless you ask me. You must never speak to him again. Do you hear me—you are never to talk to boys or go anywhere with them. I must make you remember it——”

The suddenness and the inexplicableness of this first beating turned Asia into a raving little demon.

“I hate you! I hate you!” she shouted at her mother. “I hate God! I don't believe there is any. I like Mr. Bruce better than you—he wouldn't beat me for nothing. What have I done? Go away! I hate you! You'll never be my mother again. I won't live with you! I hate you!” And then howls and shrieks of rage.

“Oh, you wicked girl!” gasped Alice, astonished and frightened by this outburst.

Asia did not realize for some minutes afterwards that she was alone. She screamed and howled, goading herself to frenzy. When she had exhausted herself she staggered to her window, cautiously pushed it up, and dropped out. She shot off in the dusk to the cliff where she scrambled and slid down by the roots of the big totara to the sand, and with nothing in her mind but the desire to get away alone she ran sobbing and whimpering along the beach to a little wooded dell, a fern-bowered spot, beloved of yellowhammers and moreporks and tuis, and enlivened by the cheerfullest of streams that trickled over polished stones into the tide below.

The dell was Asia's Bible. If the babies had been very cross she stole off to it to calm her fretted nerves. If she failed to reach Alice's standard of patience in looking for the cow or in keeping the fowls out of the vegetables, it was to the dell she went to have it out with her turbulent soul.

She reached it now breathless, falling down in the grass on a small headland that stretched out into the mangroves. There she lay dazed for over an hour. Then her lips began to twitch, and with a rush came the scalding tears.

“She beat me!” she choked at intervals, broken-hearted. “She beat me.”

She drew up her aching body, and sat with her chin on her knees, trying to find a reason for it, trying to believe it all a hideous dream, trying to think of the mother she had known that morning, the mother she now felt was gone for ever. She turned her swollen face up to the stars.

“Oh, why did she beat me?” she moaned. “I can't understand it a bit.” She kept her face strained upwards to the stars, hard as crystal in the cold sky. But they did not comfort her, or divert her from the tragedy of her wrecked world. She looked wildly round the dell, and on to the still river, both things she had grown to love, but there was no comfort there either, no voice to reassure her, or tell her it was all a mistake. As she sat on anger began to take the place of bewilderment and sorrow. She felt the beating had been unjust. It had fallen upon her out of a clear sky. She had not known it was wrong to go away with Reggie. And why was it wrong?

when Alice began to make peace with Asia the next morning she was prepared neither for the easy forgiveness and forgetfulness of the tragedy of the day before nor for the torrent of questions that was the result of the emotional intimacy of that reconciliation.

She was conscious that day that something was wrong with her method, and for the first time she longed to talk it over with somebody, and she knew the somebody meant David Bruce. She had awakened that morning thinking of him, and of his words to her the night before. She knew now that she had to see him and talk to him, that he could help her to straighten out some of the perplexities of her thinking that winter, and she wondered why it suddenly seemed to be all right. But as the day wore on, and the possibility of her seeing him that evening became more insistent, excitement welled up in her again, and her pet bogy, the beginning, arose to frighten her. She knew that if she longed to see him so much it was not right to see him at all.

But temptation kindly removed itself from her for a few days. When Roland returned from the bush that evening he made a fuss about some important paper he had forgotten to get from Bruce. And Alice learned that as the latter would not be down for some days her husband would have to make a special trip back to get it.

This left her alone to deal with Asia and her questions as best she might. And in the course of those few days she was appalled at the distance the child's mind had travelled, and hurt to find out that she had talked freely to others. In a moment of illumination she saw that this was the result of her own actions. Whenever Asia had begun to be inconveniently inquisitive, she had declared she had a headache, that she mustn't be worried, and she had thought by this means to stifle or divert that lively imagination and that vigorous curiosity.

Asia was indeed a revelation to her mother. She had been quick to turn from Alice's headaches to David Bruce, who never seemed to have headaches when she wanted to talk to him, and to Bob Hargraves, who had no scruples whatever about churning up her young mind, and to other men about the bay, who were amused at her naïve questions. She had pestered them all as to their views on God and the angels. She had collected their opinions on the subjects of what people ate in heaven, whether they wore clothes or not, whether they slept in beds, whether they were so strong that their legs and arms would not break, whether God really heard your prayers, what he really did to the wicked, and so on. And she had puzzled herself into a fever over the variety of their answers.

It was from the Socialist carpenter working on the beach that she first learned that there was no God, that nobody really believed in him, and that it did not matter whether there was a God or not, because people had to live just the same, and be nice and kind to one another, that the greatest thing in the world was to be liked, and that if you were kind you were liked, and if you were nasty you were not. As for hell, he successfully convinced her that no god of love could ever have thought of such a place for a minute.

It was when she asked him if she was to believe him instead of her mother that the carpenter saw he might get into trouble for talking to her. So he tried to explain that people had different opinions, but that some people did not like to hear about anything but their own, and so he asked her not to tell her mother what he had said. This troubled her so much that she had asked Bruce about it. He gave the carpenter and Bob Hargraves and others a hint that they had better leave her education to the people appointed to educate her. But he had difficulties with her himself.

“Do you believe God lives up in the sky?” she had asked him.

“I haven't seen Him, but lots of people think He is there,” he replied.

But she was not to be put off.

“Do you believe He is there?” she persisted.

“I don't know,” he answered truthfully.

“Do you say your prayers?” she asked.

“I pray in a different way,” he evaded.

But this only started more questions.

And so it was that when she got this chance to begin on her mother she was a questioner experienced by considerable practice, mystified by the variety of opinion, and stimulated by something that was almost a conspiracy to keep her from the things she wanted to know.

God seemed a safe and simple topic, but they had not proceeded far with Him before Alice found herself in a hopeless mess.

“Mother, do you really believe God lives up in the sky?”

They were all out in the garden the second afternoon, Betty and Mabel playing in a big box, and Alice and Asia trying to dig a plot for vegetables.

“My dear, you know I do. Why do you ask? I've always taught you that God lives in the sky.”

“Does He see us now?”

“Yes, He always sees us. I've told you all this before.”

“Does He know we want to have a nice lot of vegetables?”

“Of course He does.”

“Then why does He let the worms eat the seeds? That isn't kind.”

“Well, they won't eat them all, and they have to live on something.”

Alice thought this was satisfactory, but she saw that Asia was turning it over in her mind. She could not understand why the child no longer believed her.

“You are not digging very well. You must go deeper than that,” she said, hoping to divert her attention.

She had discovered that action and a new occupation were fine antidotes to Asia's mental restlessness. She had also learned that they might be a good thing for her own, and for that reason she had been glad to learn to garden. When she heard that Mrs. Brayton did a good deal of her digging Alice decided that she could dig a little too, and as soon as her husband had got her and Asia light spades and other garden tools they had begun to work out of doors whenever the days were fine, and now they had a few spring plants and rows of sprouting vegetables.

But along with these joys they had discovered the sorrow of worms, and Asia had developed an extraordinary vindictiveness for the predatory insects that destroyed the seeds and buds. Her mother had been amazed once to see her stamp with exalted fury upon a snail, which she called a villain and a thief, telling it that now she had got it she would show it no mercy, and giving a sigh of satisfaction when she saw its pulpy remains mixed with the earth. Indeed, snails and worms had had a good deal to do with Asia's speculations about God.

“Mother,” she said, leaning upon her little spade, “if I was God, and could make nice things, I'd never make nasty ones. I wouldn't make snails and worms to eat up the flowers.”

“But they do good in other ways,” said Alice.

“But why should they do any bad things? God could have made them all good.”

“My dear”—Alice tried to be patient—“we do not know His reasons. I do not know them any more than you do. But I believe that it will be all right, and we shall know some day.”

“But I want to know now. It won't be any use to know when we are dead.”

it will take me two weeks, perhaps three. I've told Bruce to look in. He will be down to-night. Now, there's no necessity for you to be nervous. He or Bob Hargraves can sleep here. Everybody will know why they're doing it, and nobody is going to gossip about you, and if they do they can't hurt you.”

Roland sat on his horse prepared to start for Auckland. He had been called away by telegram the next afternoon. As he spoke he went through his leather satchel to see that he had not forgotten anything.

“Oh, my cheque-book; I must have left it in the brown coat pocket,” he said, fidgeting.

Alice hurried in to get it. He was thinking of something else when she handed it to him, so he forgot to thank her.

“Well, bye-bye,” he said lightly, stooping to kiss her perfunctorily; and waving his hand to Asia at the kitchen window, he rode off.

An hour later Alice stood in front of what she called her wardrobe, wondering which of two dresses she should put on. She flushed guiltily, knowing this hesitancy was due to the fact that she wanted to look as nice as she could. She knew she had no business to dress for any man but her husband. Then she told herself she was silly, and that there was no question of dressing up. She wore the navy blue cloth dress and the grey cashmere dress alternately. They were both plain, and they both suited her. But still, there was something to choose between them. There were times when she looked better in the grey—if she had a good colour, for example. And she had a good colour now, and she knew she was likely to have it all the evening.

She tried to quiet her rising excitement as she put on the grey dress. It had long loose lines of the utmost simplicity, through which her figure showed soft and rounded. It had no collar, but there was only the suggestion of a V in the neck. After some hesitancy Alice arranged her best bit of old lace round her throat, and pinned it with a sapphire brooch, the finest bit of old jewellery that she possessed. Then she was afraid that Asia might ask her why she did not wear these things oftener. The thought worried her. She unpinned the brooch and removed the lace. But finally she put them on again, thinking that as the child knew nothing of Bruce's possible visit she would not connect the two events.

When she had finished, Alice looked at herself in the glass. She knew she was attractive, even beautiful, but for years now she had taken little comfort from the knowledge. Her fine grey eyes, whose expression had always been somewhat remote from the humanity at her feet, had grown harder, and still more unresponsive. She saw the suggestion of lines about her straight features, which the girls in the select school she had attended in her youth had called statuesque and Grecian. But her skin was as fine and as clear as ever, and her chestnut hair was full of dancing lights.

She drew back startled as she realized where her thoughts were leading her. The worst thing that could happen would be for David Bruce to see that she was beautiful, and to proceed as most men proceeded under the stress of that knowledge. She wanted his friendship, and she knew she needed it very badly, but if it were not forthcoming simply because she was a woman she must not bargain for it with her looks. Then she remembered that his helpfulness had not ceased because he had seen her in the most unbecoming of clothes and in the most unattractive of domestic settings. As a matter of fact, he had never given a sign that he was conscious of her looks. He had been exactly what she pretended she wanted. Then why was she dressing up for him now?

asia was eighteen.

For months the inevitable fact that she would be eighteen had dominated her thoughts, and her mother, watching her, sensed with her uncanny aptitude for presentiment that something was in the air. What that something was she feared so much that she refused to think about it.

Now Asia's birthday was two weeks behind her, and Alice had seen for days that the dread something was fast approaching. As she paced the beach below the cliffs one evening, with the river running silently beside her under the cool spring stars, she knew she was only indulging in her old habit of putting off the evil hour. As she walked, she hated the thought that old habits could still dominate her. She hated her own exhaustless capacity for suffering. She hated her terrible dependence on the people she loved. She hated her inability to be just where she suffered.

At last, shivering, but not with cold, she set her face homewards. Ahead of her, across the river, she saw the moving lantern of the mill watchman going his rounds, and the red lamps on the ends of the wharves, and the head lights of a big Australian barque that lay moored to one of them.

Tom Roland's dream was coming true. He had built his mill and enlarged it, and was considering enlarging it again. Almost as fast as the logs could be run down from the bush they were sawn and loaded into the timber vessels that now came from all parts of the world in a continuous procession up the river.

By day the whole bay vibrated with the whistle and screech of the circular saws, the tear of the breakdowns, the rasp of the drags, the rattling of chains on the skids, the hum of the belting, the scream and clank of the donkey engines as they loaded flitches into the voracious holds of the ships, and, as a running accompaniment to all these, the triumphant roar of the great engines that drove every wheel and chain and belt.

The shutting off of all this fuss and buzz now intensified the silence of the nights. Even Alice was conscious as she walked home of the absence of the throb of the engines, of the vacant stillness of the hushed machinery. The intermittent sounds of the night were dwarfed by the memory of the day's loud speech. She heard, as it were, from a long way off, snatches of song from the barque, and the sounds of an accordion played somewhere at the head of the bay.

She turned wearily round the cliffs, and proceeded to climb steps now cut in the clay up the bank to a path above which joined at the boss's front gate with the old path leading directly down to the store. She paused several times, trying to fortify herself with the freshness of the night. Once she lingered, listening to the cry of the new baby, the second, at Bob Hargraves' house, a chain or two on the other side of the store path. As she stood, sweet scents floated down to her from the shrubs and flowers that now hid the foundations of her home.

Roland's picnicking days were over, and with the prospect of prosperity he had been willing to make of his house something more of a setting for his increasing success. The year before he had practically rebuilt the whole structure. A narrow central hall now ran from the front door to a large lean-to containing a porch, a scullery and a bathroom with a fitted tin tub, the latter creating a precedent for the entire northern end of the Auckland province. The distinction it gave his house in the eyes of passing travellers was a source of great satisfaction to the boss. Two bedrooms had also been inserted into the middle of the cottage, just behind the enlarged front rooms.

mrs. brayton sat back on the big lounge in front of her library fire, an open book on her lap, her reading spectacles—the only kind of artificial aid she deigned to use—on the end of her nose. For some time she had sat thus, listening for steps in the garden, the light from her reading-lamp rivalling that of the dancing flames upon her faded silk gown. The night outside was filled with the soft soughing of the wind in the pines, which to-night seemed to the old lady to be more melancholy than usual.

When at last she heard the crunching on the shells a look of animation shot into her eyes and she straightened herself up. When alone, she had to admit to herself that she was growing old, but she was determined that she would not yet be old in public. Her blue eye was almost as keen as ever, and her manner had kept its fire, and her body its poise.

“Come in,” she said, rising at the tap on her windowpane.

Asia entered like a blast of river wind. She was hatless, as usual, her hair tossed about her face, her eyes feverish, her cheeks burning, her breath hurried from her fast walk. She took the old lady's hand, bent and kissed her lace and ribbon cap in a courtly fashion, looked for a moment into her eyes, and with a gesture that was both tragic and comical dropped beside her onto the lounge.

Mrs. Brayton, whom no storms could ever more ruffle, preserved her serene ease, and while waiting for Asia to get her breath, she rose again to put wood on the fire. After a second's abstraction Asia bounded to her feet, took the tongs from her, and fussed with the fire till there was a fine blaze. The action relieved her. Dropping back into one of her tangled and unlady-like attitudes, she drew her hand over her eyes.

“Thank God!” she exclaimed. “By to-morrow night it will all be over.”

Mrs. Brayton turned to her, prepared to listen.

“I would have come down, my dear, but David said it was better not.”

“Oh, Lord, yes! I've never known anything so awful as these last two days. I don't know what has come to Mother. The pater went to the bush yesterday, saying he would not be back for a week. He hates a gloomy atmosphere. Betty and Mabel are scared to death, and even Bunty is subdued. The house is like a morgue, and that foolish mother of mine like an avenging angel. All because I want to do a perfectly natural and rational thing. Oh, how is it that human beings can be so silly?” She drew herself up, trying to hide her own emotion under a veil of disgust.

Seeing the old lady's eyes fixed questioningly upon her, she went on.

“Oh, I've felt, Granny. But I've felt all I'm going to feel. There's a limit. If she had been different it would have broken me up to go. But she has made me hard. All I want now is to get the beastly business over. What is the matter with Mother, anyway?”

“It's being a mother; that's the trouble,” replied Mrs. Brayton softly.

“Oh, nonsense! All mothers are not like that. I'm sure you never were.” Asia saw a swift pain shoot into the eyes under the lace cap, and realizing that she had scored some never-mentioned wound, she pretended not to see, and raced on jerkily, “I know what I've meant to Mother. I know what she means to me, but I can't live buried in my mother, nor she in me. I want so much more than just one person. And I have waited, and I have suppressed myself. I'm not rushing off at the first impulse. I've done everything I could to please her, been a beastly hypocrite and lied—ugh! And I've managed her husband for her. And I'm not leaving her alone or in a hole of any kind. Things are better at home than they have ever been—the girls are growing up and Elsie is three and no more sign of babies. I've thought it all out, and I've waited. You don't think I'm a brute, do you?”

“No.” The old lady had recovered her composure under this torrent.

“It can't have come as a shock to her. She must have seen it coming. And she's not going to be alone when she has you and Uncle David. Fancy any woman thinking herself ill-used when she has Uncle David!” She paused, and instantly the silence became significant. Then she turned to Mrs. Brayton with one of her characteristic whirls. “I want to ask you something,” she said.

The old lady's eyes smiled a permission to proceed.

“Have you ever thought about them—wondered?”

“Why, what do you mean?” The keen eyes narrowed a little.

“About their friendship, I mean. I've often wanted to ask you. They're a mystery to me.” She stared abstractedly into the fire.

“A mystery!” repeated Mrs. Brayton.

“Yes. They must love each other. I'm sure they do; but whether there's ever been anything I can't say. And it's been so easy for them—the pater away such a lot and when I have gone out in the evenings I've said where I was going and how long I'd be away.”

“Child!” exclaimed the old lady, aghast.

“What—why—wasn't that sensible?”

“Sensible! Oh, ye gods! And this is the child! The unsophisticated country child!” Mrs. Brayton stared at her, too amazed to be shocked.

“It's the result of your teaching, yours and Uncle David's.” There was a twinkle in Asia's eyes.

the next day, having purposely postponed her packing, Asia was busy till the last moment. Betty and Mabel went about the house all the morning with hushed voices and scared eyes. As this was the first domestic crisis into which they had entered it assumed the terrifying proportions of a world break-down. Bunty played outside, and the baby, Elsie, after being once severely slapped by Alice, retired to break her childish heart among the runner beans in a corner of the garden.

But there were no signs of emotional upheaval about Alice. There were dark rings of sleeplessness about her eyes, but she went about as usual, shirking none of the little things she did when she was well. And with her there moved an atmosphere that froze everybody who came near her.

Asia was to leave at one o'clock. She did not attempt to sit down to lunch. Instead, she choked over slices of bread and butter as she finished her packing. Alice and the children sat down to a sad meal, where the two girls sobbed at intervals, and held each other's hands under the table, and where Bunty was the only one who ate.

After lunch two men came to carry Asia's trunk down to the sailing boat where David Bruce stood waiting for her.

At last, with a flushed face, Asia came out of her room. Alice immediately left the kitchen and walked to the front of the house. Asia kissed Bunty and Elsie, telling them that if they were very good she would send them something nice. Betty and Mabel sobbed openly upon her shoulder, as she begged them to be kind and helpful.

“Take the children out and down to the boat,” she whispered, as she turned out into the hall.

before Bruce reached the bay Alice had left for Mrs. Brayton's.

She did not go straight there, but stayed for over an hour in the dell, sitting on a little point above the mangroves. A tui sang in the gully behind her, shags occasionally flapped by on their way up stream, sparrows and fantails flew about her inquisitively. But she was dead to the sunlight and the call of the spring. She shed no tears. She scarcely moved.

When she finally reached the pines Mrs. Brayton was working on a bed for annuals. The old lady knew it was no occasion for flippancy, and even if it had been she could not have risen to it. For once she was at a loss as to how to proceed.

But Alice greeted her coolly, begged her to go on with her raking, and suggested that she should help her. The loveliness of the Spring day in that sheltered and seductive garden had an instant effect upon her.

So, avoiding carefully any reference to Asia's departure, they hoed and raked together, talking as they worked of plants, the last curate, the delay of the English mail, and of the topic that was then absorbing the attention of all English people in New Zealand—the declining health of Queen Victoria.

But even as they talked Alice felt that Mrs. Brayton must think her a fool, or worse. She knew the old lady could hardly avoid taking sides. She had been rather bitter during the last three days about the part she and Bruce had played in helping and perhaps encouraging Asia to go. The thought that her two best friends had helped to bring about the thing she had dreaded for years was not an easy one to dismiss, and only her urgent need of those friends helped her to forgive them. The thought that she herself was hopelessly in the wrong did not make it any easier for her to look either of them in the face. Less ashamed to meet Mrs. Brayton, she had come first to her, feeling blindly that until she was at peace with both of them she would be utterly alone in the world.

She hoped the old lady would not order tea. There was something about the sociability of that meal that made it impossible to bolster up reserves, and Alice hated to think that the moment would be fixed when she might have to begin the inevitable references to Asia's departure.

Fortunately, the new curate appeared, and he was welcomed with a warmth not always bestowed upon the usually well-timed visits of country curates at meal hours. He stayed to dinner, with no smallest notion of the situation into which he had precipitated himself. However, his ignorance was infinitely more helpful than his knowledge could have been.

He thought Mrs. Brayton charming, and Mrs. Roland an attractive-looking, but frigid and dull woman. As a non-member of his church, she was more or less removed from the social sphere he desired, even at Kaiwaka. He had not been in New Zealand long enough to realize that in that radical country church membership did not constitute an entrée to exclusiveness, and that in the remote districts of the northern bushes it was not regarded as important.

By the end of dinner even Mrs. Brayton's powers of endurance were approaching their limit. Ordering a fire in her own room—for the night had turned chilly—and leaving Harold to digest the curate as best he might, she drew Alice by the arm out of the library and along the hall.

“I must be going,” began Alice weakly, realizing that once they were alone again she would have to unbend.

“You are not going,” said Mrs. Brayton with determination, resolved now to manage the business herself.

They entered the old-fashioned room with the firelight playing about the four-poster, on the much patterned wall paper, and on the deep chintz-covered chairs.

Alice felt like a child led out for a parental scolding. And like a child she sat down stonily, frozen again, and unable to help with the beginning.

Taking one of her hands, Mrs. Brayton sat down beside her on the low lounge. She began rather nervously, but as Alice gave no sign of hostility she continued with more assurance, till her voice deepened and broke as she went on with the personal confession.

“My dear, I know how you are feeling, and you can't help some of it. But, you know, we have no right to make the young unhappy. Asia has committed no crime save the crime of being able to get on without you. I know that hurts—it hurt me once. But we parents are all wrong. We think these children of ours are our property, that they must come when we say come, and go when we say go. We think we have a right to discourage them, to hamper them, to fill them with innumerable fears, just because they are young, and we think they don't know life. My dear, they know more about life than we have any idea of, and they hate our interference. They hate it. And if we persist in interfering they will hate us. They may not show it. They may tolerate us afterwards. They may keep up a brave show of affection. They may remember our birthdays and keep us out of draughts, and encourage our secret affection for sugar candy. But the great thing will be gone for ever. They will cease to speak to us of vital things, and they will talk to us only about flowers and the weather.”

“My dear”—the old lady paused, her head lowered, her hands closing nervously on Alice's—“I had one daughter. I idolized her—never for years did I let her out of my sight. I swayed her, so I thought, body and soul, and I believed we were the greatest friends on earth. I did not think she could do a thing that would displease me, and I thought that was the right thing between mother and daughter. Then the man came—a man I did not think rich enough or good enough. I talked of my rights and my will, and my affection and my sacrifice, and my views, as if I had a monopoly over these things. She listened—she was very courteous, she never answered me back—and then she ran away with him. They had one year of happiness, except that she grieved because I never saw or wrote to them, and when the baby was born and she lay dying they sent for me. It was more than I deserved. I went. All she had time to say was, ‘Oh, Mother,’ and then she lay back dead. I have seen her as she lay there every hour of my life since——”

She stopped, for Alice had burst into a devastating passion of tears.

For nearly an hour Mrs. Brayton soothed her, saying little, and knowing that the tears were a relief.

Neither then nor ever afterwards did Alice make any reference to the story she had just heard, but it altered her whole attitude of mind towards Mrs. Brayton, and drew her to her as nothing else could have done, and killed her pride and her foolish aloofness.

“I do not know what is the matter with me,” she choked, struggling for composure. “Feeling makes me blind. It does something to me—I don't know what. I have been cruel to her and it is all my fault. And to-day I couldn't wave to her. I couldn't—I wanted to, but I couldn't——”

“What!” Mrs. Brayton sat up. “You didn't say good-bye to her!”

“Oh, yes, in a way—at the house; but at the boat she waved, and I could not. And I wish I had.” Her tears flowed afresh.

“Then you can send a telegram and say so.” Mrs. Brayton realized the pathos of this little incident. “I'll write it out, and the curate can take it to the post office to-night, so that it will go first thing in the morning. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” sobbed Alice.

we must be about there, Ross,” said Barrie Lynne. Both men looked out of the Kaipara train upon a narrow tidal creek that wound a serpentine course about a great waste of mangrove flats. Beyond them a line of shining sandhills suggested beaches and the open sea. From the Kaipara harbour, as yet out of sight, came a pungent salty smell, pleasantly mingling with the freshness of the spring morning.

With spasmodic jerks that rattled the teeth in the jaws, the train slowed down to the Helensville station, where the long-suffering passengers, with an air of extreme thankfulness, gathered up their parcels and scrambled out.

The people who passed through Helensville belonged, with but few exceptions, to the desperate, the disappointed, the sanguine, and the disillusioned. The desperate headed for the northern gum-fields as a last resource; the disappointed were teachers, or members of the Civil Service ordered to such minor positions as third-grade post offices or inspectorships; the sanguine were farmers or fruit growers, confident that the soil only needed their special attention to yield up its share of riches; and the disillusioned were those who had passed that way before.

Nobody ever stayed in Helensville except the people who failed to make connections between the steamers and the trains. They constituted a floating population upon which three hotels and two boarding-houses flourished. Nobody ever lived in Helensville except the people who had failed to make a living anywhere else. Everybody who went through it was told the old gag that its name should have ended with the first syllable, but there was no evidence that in that event it would have rivalled its famous name-sakenamesake for interesting company. It might have done better with regard to climate and to smells.

Allen Ross sniffed on the station platform.

“Let's see how soon we can get out of this,” he said.

A chain or two away one of two small steamers, lying against a wharf that was merely an extension of the station grounds, now emitted columns of smoke and whistled ostentatiously.

The two men followed the passengers from the train, who all hurried towards it. On the way Ross singled out a tall, grey-haired man.

“Pardon, can you tell me where these steamers go?” he asked.

Taking his pipe from his mouth, Bruce looked curiously into the stranger's face and at that of his companion.

“Certainly,” he replied; “one to the Wairoa, and one to the Otamatea.”

“Which goes first?”

Bruce smiled, realizing some element of chance. But he had no presentiment of how much.

“The Otamatea boat as soon as she can get away. That's in about a quarter of an hour.”

“Thanks. Any settlements up there?”

“Yes.”

“Could we camp, and get boating and fishing?”

“Yes, anywhere.”

“That sounds as if it might suit.” With an interested nod he turned to Lynne, and Bruce walked on.

“Shall we settle it that way, Barrie?”

“By all means.”

They hurried back to the station to make the necessary arrangements about their luggage, and when the Ethel, delayed on their account, finally got away, the two men, with all their belongings, were on board.

The passengers, with the sense of selection peculiar to travellers by boat, soon arranged themselves according to their social and commercial grades. A government inspec-tor,inspector, to whom all northern doors were open, began to talk to a landowner and his two daughters, who, to the envy of their own section, had just made their annual shopping tour to Auckland. Near them the commercial traveller, without whom no boat or train ever got anywhere in New Zealand, listened to their gushing with mingled feelings of boredom and amusement.

Five saddened teachers, who had vainly hoped for moves back to civilization, talked heatedly of the unfairness of the recent examinations, and confirmed each other's idea that the Board of Education needed to be tidied up.

Seated on a coil of rope, dressed in cheap new readymade clothes and soft hats—the hall-mark of the comparatively prosperous searcher after work—sat two men, who had already, with native cunning, picked out Bruce and the landowner as possible employers of casual labour.

Down on the lower deck, by the toy hatchway, sat two seasoned gum-diggers, maudlin and nervous after a giddy week in Auckland, and near them, as if conscious of kinship, sat a curved and shrunken figure, with a brand new gum outfit beside him, who was heading for the gum-fields as a last resource. Those who knew the ropes gave him the benefit of a second glance, for, though drink and general misery had drained the individuality out of him, he might, as far as their previous experience went, have been anything from a bootblack to a university professor or the son of an earl. It was his horrible cough, rather than the pitifulness of his latest profession, that first attracted Bruce.

A pioneer family, munching blackballs and bananas, was huddled together, also on the lower deck. To the shy and awkward children the voyage was an adventure beyond their grasp. To their sanguine parents it was part of the hopefulness of the new beginning, and had in it, for that reason, as much of a pleasant thrill as they would ever know.

Completing the familiar elements of the human cargo, a many-coloured Maori group laughed and chattered in the bow with their native philosophic indifference to the turns of fortune that is the despair of the envious white man.

Allen Ross and Barrie Lynne both felt, as they leaned against the gunwale, the eyes of most of the Ethel world upon them, that they were the unknown quantity. A splendid isolation was forced upon them, for, apart from Bruce, there was no person of their quality aboard. As a matter of fact, their presence seemed so unusual as almost to demand an explanation.

Bruce himself had not been able to resist another scrutiny of them as he took a privileged stand beside the captain at the wheel. He wondered idly what had turned them northwards. It was not the shooting season, and there were no trout streams worth while north of Auckland, he reflected, but as the dark man looked cruelly used up he guessed that a desire merely for rest and an outdoor life explained their trip in that direction.

The little boat was now well under way, twisting and turning with the creek. Allen Ross looked over the mangrove flats at the western sandhills with the exhausted, but thankful air of one who knows he has finally outrun an enemy. His head, always carried high, was covered with thick black hair that slightly waved. His keen face, which was curiously eager for a man who even at thirty knew most of the crooked ways of men, was long and thin and lined. It was unusually tanned for a city dweller, as his whole bearing obviously proclaimed him to be. It was not easy to tell at first wherein his compelling attraction lay. But, tired though he was, his singular vitality travelled like an electric current round that little boat. Before they reached the open harbour every woman and many of the men could have given the details of his physiognomy and dress.

His friend Barrie Lynne was built on weaker lines. He was just as tall, and just as straight, and just as easy. He was more conventionally handsome. But when the two men were together the eyes of most people passed over him to Ross and stayed there. It was true that a larger number of women had passed their hands through Lynne's soft brown hair, but that was a matter of their opportunity rather than their desire. Lynne made a habit of succumbing to temptation. Ross made a luxury of it. Lynne could never ignore a hint. Many an eye had vainly flashed at Ross. Almost any attractive woman who signified her willingness was good enough to climb with Lynne to the Venus Mount. But Ross required special qualifications in the woman who should listen with him to the birds twittering in the dawn. To Lynne a feeling for the dawn was not important. To Ross it was.

This was not obvious to the unsophisticated passengers on the little boat. All they saw was two handsome men who, they instinctively knew, had got the better of the world, and to those more or less helpless people who see in the world only a series of enemy powers to fight, instead of a series of friendly powers to use, there is nothing more wonderful than the besting of them.

Lynne was interested in watching the passengers in return. He got the tragedies and comedies of the collection without much speculation. Ross was not so interested. He knew that there were few people on that boat who from his point of view had ever done anything worth while. And so for him the passengers, with one exception, did not exist.

The exception was David Bruce. When at dinner-time he appeared at the saloon table with the derelict, who had hitherto sat ignored and apart, Ross found his eyes wandering again and again back to that story-telling face.

“That man is stunning, Lynne,” he said. “Look at the way he's handling that wreck. He has the manner of a doctor.”

And many times during the rest of the voyage Bruce found the dark eyes of the tired stranger fixed upon his face.

When they came up from dinner they found the whole expanse of the Kaipara harbour spread out before them. As they neared the heads they saw billowing up into the sky the lines of the “comber, wind hounded,” that heaved and thundered and broke upon the dangerous bar. The Ethel began her dreaded somersaults, and though the agony was brief it temporarily changed for many their views of life.

After skirting the mouth of the Wairoa, the Ethel turned into the wide mouth of the Otamatea. They passed several fish-canning factories, and an old missionary station, with its rows of poplars along the beach, a clump or two of pines, and the wooden fences buried between rows of huge geranium bushes running wild. Deserted many years previously, it wore an old-world air of unpruned maturity and uninterrupted peace.

At intervals along the banks, from small Maori settlements clustering by little sandy beaches, there came calls that were vigorously answered by the natives aboard. Three times the Ethel stopped at toy wharves from which roads led off into the wilds. After unloading cases and barrels whether there was any one to meet them or not, she snorted off as if she despised these menial tasks. Now and then some one pointed out a collection of buildings with its familiar pine clumps as the home of some big sheep man or orchard grower.

About four o'clock Lynne called attention to a small sailing-boat that came zigzagging down the river. Both men saw that Bruce was interested in it, and that he left his conversation with the captain to watch it, as, with reckless daring, it tacked across the steamer's bows, cut through the water on the left, and came round on the wind at her stern with a flourish, and so alongside.

“It's a girl!” exclaimed Lynne, in amazement.

Then the figure at the stern stood up, one hand on the tiller, and the other gripping the mainsail rope.

Asia was not unaware of the fact that she was the episode of the voyage. But she was so accustomed to striding her little world like a colossus that she knew it merely as a detached matter of fact, and not as a matter for selfcongratulation.

the next morning the two men found their way up the road towards the bay, looking for a cottage they had been told might be to let. The hotel proprietor had advised them to have a house as well as their tents, and the lurid picture he gave them of the uncertainty of the weather in those parts had impressed them with the common sense of the suggestion.

At various places on the way they paused to look down through leafy gaps upon the river, which a fast-rising, angry wind was churning into clumps of froth. Every now and then a furious gust bore down branches in their faces, and sent showers of twigs scattering in all directions. There was an intoxication in the keen air that got them both by the throat.

Unexpectedly they came upon a well-trod path leading towards the river. They followed it a little way to find another branching from it, and after they had stood a moment speculating they followed this new one. It led into a small clearing, in the centre of which they saw what they rightly took to be the cottage they were searching. They picked their way over the logs, stumps and brushwood. There was a nice air of crudity about the small dwelling, bare and unpainted, and shut off from the world by its circular wall of bush. Ross liked it the minute he looked at it.

They walked round it, and looking through the windows, saw that it had three small rooms and an open fireplace. It was surrounded with its own wood supply in profusion, and for water there was a new zinc tank fed from spouting that ran round the corrugated iron roof.

“If this is it, I say we take it,” said Ross.

shivering with emotional excitement, Asia lifted her hands from the piano, after the final bar of the Kreutzer Sonata, and looked up into Bruce's face.

“Jove! You played that wonderfully.” He smiled down at her. “You always do play well in a storm, you queer mortal. What's the matter?”

For she had turned her head suddenly to the window, which rattled viciously as blasts from the river drove against it.

“Oh, I don't know. But I feel as if there was somebody about.”

Getting up, she went to the window, and pressed her face against the panes, peering into the blackness.

“Uncle David,” she swung around, “did you hear some one call?”

“Why, no.” He moved towards her. “Did you?”

“I thought I did. But I always do hear voices on nights like these. I hear the people who are being wrecked and the people who are being lost. And there are always some when a storm comes up as quickly as this one. I guess the pater stayed in the bush.”

They moved back into the room. Asia closed the piano and put away the music. Then, abstractedly, she dropped into a chair by the fire.

Bruce noticed how unusually restless she was as he sat down opposite her and began to smoke.

“Oh, dear,” she began, after a few minutes' silence, “Uncle David, I hate to disturb you, but would you go out and tie up that gate? I don't know what is the matter with me, but I can't stand that squeaking to-night. Do you mind?”

allen ross stared spasmodically at the small pale blue object, wondering what it was. It had not hung on the door the night before, he would swear to that. He closed his hot tired eyes. But each time that he opened them it was still there. Presently he made out that it was round and woolly. But further effort to account for it became too wearying. Soon afterwards he made another discovery—somebody had taken the varnish off the door. He was glad, for he hated varnish.

After a short doze he once more studied the blue woolly object. He felt sure that somewhere, probably in some former reincarnation, he had been on familiar terms with it. It fascinated and perplexed him. He forced his eyes away from it.

Then he knew he was going mad. Yesterday the paper had been covered with enormous blue daisies attached to greeny-brown rose leaves on a yellow ground; to-day it was grey, with a frieze in pastel shades of blue and rose. Also, Daphne never fled from Apollo on the pub wall. Of that he was certain.

Once more he closed his eyes, trying to realize that he knew the facts of his personality and environment. He determined that, come what might, he would keep sane. He tried to go over what had happened the day before. He supposed it was the day before. They had walked up from the pub. They had seen the cottage. They had met——

His eyes opened and met again the woolly cap. Now he knew where he had seen it before. Now he knew where he had got to. But what had happened? It came back to him slowly—the ride to Kaiwaka on a cranky horse, the long wait for Mr. King, whom he had been determined to see, the setting out again in the dusk, the onslaught of the storm, the accident, the oblivion, the slow return to consciousness, the discovery that he was off the road, the sickening fight against stupor, the long desperate struggle to reach the river, the stimulus of the red mill lamps, the last drag along the beach below the cliffs, and up the slope towards a light, and, finally, wonderful music.

He was very tired by the time he had pieced it all together, and he realized that he was very ill. He found that he could not move without pain and faintness, so he lay still, trying not to think. But indistinct impressions of people, of faces, eyes, and low voices came and went in his sub-consciousness.

When he was able to open his eyes again they rested on rows and rows of books on plain shelves opposite the foot of his bed. By degrees he realized different things in the room: a Verestchagin print, the very incarnation of loneliness—one big palm tree, one vulture, one tiger, and one heap of a man in a jungle clearing. He saw Boeklin's “Isle of Death.” He saw “Tivoli” and “Venice” and “The Fighting Temeraire” as Turner saw them. And he saw prints and etchings of old masters and cathedrals.

From a corner by the window “The Winged Victory” of Samothrace seemed to be leaping at him, and over the top of an old silver bowl of glorious roses that stood beside his bed he could see the head and shoulders of a small “Venus de Milo” and parts of brass candlesticks and bronze ornaments on a high mahogany bureau. It all seemed so unreal that he had to open his eyes upon it several times to be sure that it was really there beside that lonely river.

Feeling the strain of consciousness and enjoyment, he dropped off into an uneasy sleep just before Lynne stole in again to watch beside him.

Ross had already been ill four days. For the first two either Bruce or Asia had been beside his bed every moment, for his chill had turned to pneumonia. Lynne had been with him all the time, dozing fitfully on an improvised bed on the floor. He had faithfully obeyed all orders without fuss, and wisely saw that it was not the time to look significantly at Asia, or to take her kindness and hospitality for more than it was worth.

For the first two nights Ross had been delirious, and in his fever, as he tossed and turned, he had begged and implored something or somebody to leave him alone. Over and over again he had appealed with pitiful intensity to that invisible, implacable foe. His misery brought tears to Asia's eyes, and affected even Bruce.

“Poor devil! He has been terribly worried,” he said to her as they watched.

On the sixth night, after Lynne and Asia had watched him fall asleep, the crisis well passed, he thought the situation was advanced sufficiently for him to tell her the story.

“I suppose you know he is married,” he began.

“Oh, yes. I knew that in Sydney,” she answered lightly.

Then, as she appeared interested, he went on to tell her of the wretched marriage to a pretty, heartless girl who thought she had brains and temperament, but who had instead the kind of hysteria that is the hardest in the world to deal with. She could be so charming to the people she hoped to get something out of that there were not many who knew what a hell she made of life for her husband. Finally, he had had to leave her, providing generously for her out of a small private income. But she had pursued him wherever she could, even into his law classes, and to his public meetings, where she had, on several occasions, made disgraceful scenes.

Worn out temporarily with work for his political party, wishing to study law in peace, and sick to death of her, Ross had stolen off to New Zealand, his departure known only to a few friends, who were to try to see in his absence if something could not be done with her.

Most of what Lynne told her Asia already knew, as she had had sidelights on Ross from various angles. She hid her amusement when Lynne tried to make it plain that when Ross was rested he would return to his law exams, his politics and his career, and that, in future, women would be merely incidents by the way. She was much too discerning a person not to see why he thus casually disposed of his friend's plans. But she let him talk on.

At the end of another week Ross was well enough to take liberties with the situation. But he did not take them. He ignored, whether deliberately or not, Asia could not say, the privileges allowed to the sick. He was an admirable patient, pitifully grateful for all the attention paid him, and patient to a degree that surprised his nurses. He gave numerous signs of which he was unconscious of the trying experience through which he had passed.

While he was very ill he had been indifferent as to who sat with him, but as he grew better his eyes began to follow Asia wistfully about the room, and he kept looking at the door when she was out. But it was not until two nights before Alice returned that he attempted to take Asia's hand as she sat alone beside him.

asia met her mother at Point Curtis with the launch, one of the new things that Alice had welcomed, for she had always been nervous in the sailing-boat.

The usual steamer-day crowd was waiting on the wharf as the Ethel was guided alongside with more fuss than if she had been an ocean liner.

“Dear me, your ma gets younger every year,” said a farmer's wife, smiling as she spoke at Mrs. Roland, who had just recognized her as she stood near Asia.

“Yes,” Asia looked curiously at her mother, seeing her afresh, and admiring her new tailored suit.

Alice had been in Auckland a month. She had gone mainly because the Brough Company was playing a series of modern plays which Asia said she must positively see, and because Asia had successfully educated Roland to face the fact that seeing plays was part of ordinary modern life for women whose husbands were in the position he was. Roland had become, as he had succeeded, more susceptible to the mandates of public opinion. He had been in the habit of taking women to the theatre if there was anything they wanted to see when he was in Auckland, but formerly the mere suggestion that his wife should take a trip to the city for the purpose of seeing plays would have met with a snort of scorn. However, Asia had taken full advantage of the fact that, at various times, passing travellers in for a meal had assumed that the wife of so prosperous a person as the boss naturally visited Auckland at intervals to keep up to date.

Though not a highly suggestible person where spending money on his wife was concerned, the boss had in the last year or two become more generous to her, and he was quick to see where anything in his treatment of her was likely to reflect upon himself. So that if she wished to go to Auckland she was now free to go, and she had on occasions accompanied her husband at his own request to attend some big function where the addition of a beautiful wife helped his social status.

This last time Alice had gone with Bruce as escort, a business trip for Roland happening to coincide with the arrival of the Brough Company. It had been the first they had ever taken together, and it had been the boss's suggestion. Alice had stayed with the Hardings, and Bruce had lived at an hotel. The morals of Auckland would have survived their staying under the same roof, and Mrs. Harding laughed at Alice's scruples, but could not cure them.

Frequent visits to the city were only a part of recent changes in Alice's life. Ever since the birth of her last dead baby she had lived alone in her room. She did not know that Bruce, in his capacity as doctor, had, after much deliberation, decided to talk seriously to her husband about her health, which had declined steadily after Elsie's birth. She had merely thought that at last he had come to feel that she was unattractive as a wife, and that he preferred to drop the pretence of caring for her in the only way she had supposed he cared. But she was puzzled over the fact that he had become, not less kind and friendly, as she would have expected, but more generous and more considerate.

Personally, she had no regrets for the change in their relations, but only an intense gratitude, mingled sometimes with the fear that as her health improved he might claim her as a wife again. He had never spoken to her on the subject of the change, which had come about naturally. Nobody had remarked on the fact that after her long illness he had continued to sleep in Bunty's room. Her children had not appeared to notice it. Asia had never hinted at any knowledge of it. And so the thing she had longed for, but could never have managed for herself, had happened without her knowing how.

Eight months before the arrival of the Australians Alice had had an operation which had been urged by David Bruce to save attacks of pain and debility from which she had long suffered. Asia returned from Sydney the day her mother went into hospital, and helped to nurse her back to what proved to be a second youth.

It was while they were both in a Rotorua sanatorium, where Alice was being massaged by the best masseur in the colony, that they got the news of Mrs. Brayton's sudden death.

As Alice had received a spirited letter from her only three days before, the news was a shock to both her and Asia, and the manner of the gallant old lady's passing, as it was told in the papers, upset them still more.

Mrs. Brayton had always declared that she would die standing, and she almost did. She had caught influenza, a disease she despised, and, in spite of David Bruce's protests as to its seriousness, she refused to go to bed. In the middle of one morning, after he had been up with her all night, and had told her she was not to get up, her heartbroken old maids found her gasping on the floor, partly dressed. Before they could even get her on to her lounge she was dead.

Asia kept the reports of the funeral from her mother as long as she could, but Alice evaded her and bought old papers giving accounts of it. It had taken on the size and importance in the public mind of a great event. Tom Roland had closed all his works, and the Kaiwaka and bay schools had a holiday. People from a radius of twenty miles had crowded round the grave in a corner of her garden, sobbing for something they had lost, even if it was only the oft-told tale of her open gate, and her home-brewed ale, and her pleasant chatter. To all who had seen her in her own domain she was to remain a vision, an ideal appropriately haloed by the grandeur of her material possessions.

the next day Alice saw that Ross was the preferred man. And she heard also, through one of the girls, whom Lynne had told, because they asked him, that he was married.

She knew that he possessed the same characteristics after she had received this information as he had before, but her opinion of them mysteriously changed. She did not mean to allow any sign of the change to appear in her manner until she had had more time to consider the possibilities that lay ahead. For two days she avoided danger by staying away from Asia and Ross, finding her excuse in the amount of work which she said had to be done in the garden.

On the third morning Ross told Asia that he felt well enough to move to his cottage. She knew that he was not strong enough to go, or to eat as he and Lynne would be likely to eat, and that he would not be ready for it for another week at least. And she guessed, also, why he spoke.

That afternoon, as Alice sat sewing and resting beside her western window, Asia opened her door after a short knock, and walked half-way across the room, where she stood with a rigidity unlike her usual ease and mobility.

Alice sensed trouble in her cool level tones.

“Mother, Mr. Ross talks of moving to-morrow. He isn't well enough to go, and he was to stay here another week. You must have made him feel he isn't wanted.”

“I'm sure I've done nothing of the kind,” said Alice warmly, as she looked up. “I've been perfectly courteous——”

“I didn't say you hadn't, Mother. You might be that, and yet not want him to stay. But he won't be any trouble to you, and you must let him think you do want him to stay.”

Their eyes met for a moment, and Alice saw something new and defiant, and fiercely hostile at the back of Asia's, something she had never seen there before. It startled her.

“My dear, of course I've nothing against his staying. I had supposed he would. What do you want me to do?”

“Well, you will have to make it plain, Mother. Sick people are very sensitive.”

“I don't know what I've done,” went on Alice.

“It isn't what you've done, Mother, so much as something you're thinking. And you have a manner that would freeze hell.” She saw her mother was hurt by this expression, but at that moment she did not care.

“What do you want me to do?” asked Alice with an air of resignation that taxed Asia's patience.

“Mother, you know very well. Don't pretend you don't. I know what you are thinking. But you might as well stop it, because that sort of thinking never does any good. Now I'm going to make tea. Will you have it with us? And will you act as if you were enjoying it?”

Though to Alice this resembled an invitation to put her head in the lion's mouth, she fought her feeling of hurt and resentment.

“Very well,” she said quietly.

Turning, Asia swung out with an air suggestive of a final ultimatum.

Uncompromising candour was a thing Alice never could cope with in any one but Bruce, who knew how to temper it with humour and graciousness. Asia's cold words, sensible and straight though they were, left her sore and helpless.

She wondered how, after this interview, she could possibly go out and be pleasant and natural to Allen Ross. She wondered how she was to rid herself of the sense of fate that had hung over her for three days. She wondered how she could keep out of her manner the evidence of the thoughts that would crowd her mind. But she felt she must try. That something she had seen in Asia's eyes frightened her. She wanted passionately to keep something she did not know how to keep.

She stood up and looked out upon the sun-swept river and the drowsy western hills. All life seemed drugged in the enervating stillness of that soft spring day, all except that around the mills, which remained, as ever, oblivious of heat and cold, and sun and rain. She saw a clutch of flitches rise into the air between the masts of a vessel at one of the wharves. She watched it swing and drop and disappear into the hold. The hum and grind and scream of the machinery were deadened a little by the humidity in the air. But there was something in the vitality of that agglomeration of sounds that helped her.

She smoothed her hair, put in a new comb, inspected her hands, and taking up the garment she had been sewing, she walked into the front room. She did not know whether Ross knew that Asia had spoken to her.

“It must be tea-time,” she began with a forced serenity.

Ross knew nothing of the recent interview, but he felt her restraint. Because she attracted him he was determined to overcome it. He raised himself off his cushions.

“I think Miss Roland is making it. Let me get you a chair.”

“Oh, no, thank you,” commanded Alice quickly. “Don't attempt to get up, please.” She walked to her rocker near the fireplace. As she sat down she saw that he would have to turn round in order to face her and sit comfortably. He made a move to readjust himself.

“Don't move,” she said, getting up again.

“Won't you come nearer, so that I can talk to you?” he asked.

She thought his voice sounded appealing as he looked at her across the top of the table, and unable to resist that friendliness, she dragged her chair to the foot of the sofa, and sat down facing him.

no French to-night!” repeated Ross.

He had risen from a stump to meet Asia as she crossed the clearing. He saw that she carried a kit stuffed with things done up in newspaper, and a lantern.

She had on an old print dress faded to whiteness, and wore no hat. A bit of the sunset came through the trees to gleam upon her hair.

“Where are you going?” he demanded, as she came up to him.

“Over on the gum-field. Somebody dying. I think he came up the day you did. Consumption. Uncle David was there last night. But he can't go to-night.”

Allen Ross looked curiously at her. He saw she went to dying men as simply as she did other things belonging to the place. It did not occur to him to pay her any compliments about it.

“How far is it?” he asked.

“Between three and four miles.”

“Why don't you ride?”

“The track's too bad at night.”

“I want to come,” he said, a light flashing across his eyes.

She caught her breath, but tried to answer lightly.

“You would be bored. I may read the Bible and pray.”

But he did not smile, as she expected him to.

“Do you ever?” he asked gravely.

“Yes, often. Wouldn't you do anything a dying man wanted you to do?”

“Certainly, if I could.”

two nights later, as David Bruce was walking alone towards his shanty from the store, he was arrested by a light shining from the dining-room of Tom Roland's house. He could not have told exactly why he stopped, for it was not unusual for a light to be there even at midnight. He speculated about it, knowing the boss was away, and that no one was ill. Suspecting why it still burned, he turned towards it with a sigh.

He walked in by the back door unannounced, and, as he expected, he found Alice sitting up alone. One glance at her face told him why she waited.

“You are sitting up for her,” he said.

She resented the reproach in his tone.

“David, I cannot bear it any longer. I must speak. She stays out later and later every night.”

He stood before her, making no attempt to sit down.

“Do you think speaking to her will stop that?” he asked wearily.

“Yes. She will have to listen to me. I have something to say that will make her listen.”

For once he missed the significance of her positive tone.

“She will listen, my dear. She will listen courteously enough. She will tell you she understands your feeling and your point of view. And you know what she will do after that, don't you?”

She looked up at him and away again. He saw that her lips were set in an agony of determination, and that she was unmoved.

“She will do exactly what she wants to do,” he went on quietly.

She dropped her face into her hands.

refusing to think any more that night, Alice dropped into a heavy sleep from which she was startled only by Asia's knock and the usual question as to whether she would get up or have her breakfast in bed. As the door was not opened she merely roused herself sufficiently to say she would have it in her room, then she sank back to doze for some minutes before she remembered that something had happened. At first she could not think what it was. She puzzled over scraps of sentences that danced about in her memory like a spot of light reflected on a wall from a moving mirror.

Then her mind cleared suddenly, and she saw herself back in Bruce's room, and remembered that she had told him her story, and that it made no difference to him. She was not as surprised at this as she might have been. It seemed now as if she had always known that she would tell him, and that he would understand. It was other things in the evening that crowded upon her attention, that stung her to wide-awakeness. She knew she had not dreamt them. She knew they were true. She told herself she had to decide what she was going to do about them.

She stared at her wall as if she saw there in letters of fire that Asia was going away with Allen Ross, and that nothing could stop her, as if she saw there in burning words the reason why she, of all people, was the one least able to help or prevent them.

“Good morning, Mother; how do you feel?”

As the door opened wide Alice jumped, and stared at the familiar face and form that hid a mind so much a stranger to her. She could hardly believe that the greeting and the tone were the same ones that she had heard with little variation all down the years.

“Oh,” she exclaimed stupidly, startled into temporization. “I must have dozed again.” Her head dropped back, and she pretended to be very sleepy.

As in a dream she watched Asia fix the blinds, regulate the windows, and bring the breakfast table to her bedside. Nothing could have looked more innocent of defiance to the traditions than she did. She was dressed in the simplest of blue gingham frocks, her hair piled loosely on her head. If she felt uncertainty or anxiety she was clever enough not to show it. So far sleeplessness had left no telling marks upon her. She looked as fresh as the early morning, as sweet as an ocean wind, as sure of herself as a river running swiftly to the sea. Seeing her now in the light of her chosen future, her mother could only feel that she was too unreal to be true.

As she finished settling the breakfast table Asia smiled into her mother's eyes with a studied pleasantness. She knew her mother had not slept well, but she ignored the fact as one of those she had made up her mind to ignore. She thought she knew exactly what her mother's attitude was and would be, she felt words on either side would be utterly useless, she hoped they would get through the summer on the mutual understanding that there was nothing to be said, and she meant, if her mother went along without an open break, to talk to her some time later, when they might both speak more calmly with so much of the experience behind them. She thought she knew what it would mean to her mother. But with the terrible ruthlessness of youth, combined with her own hard common sense, she told herself that her mother had had her chance, and that age had no business to cripple the impulses and desires and plans of youth.

She knew that so far her mother had had nothing but suspicions to go upon. She had learned from David Bruce the night before that he had till then said nothing, and she had supposed he would go on saying nothing, although she had not asked him to.

Alice had seen for some time that Asia was managing her. Sometimes it had amused her; sometimes it had hurt. She had made up her mind several times that she would not let it go on, but she had always succumbed weakly in the end, feeling that for the sake of peace she might as well, that it didn't matter. Now she saw that it might be the easiest way out of this crisis, that if she let herself be managed they might avoid the break that she dreaded as much as Asia did. She could not smile back at her, but she looked past her inquiringly at her dressing-jacket hanging over the back of the chair.

“It's going to be a hot day, Mother. You'd better not work in the garden,” said Asia, as she reached for it.

“Oh, very well.”

“Don't you want to sit up?”

Mechanically Alice drew herself off the pillows, while Asia helped her into her negligee.

“Now, don't let your coffee get cold, Mother,” and with that she was gone, closing the door behind her.

“Don't work in the garden, Mother. Don't let your coffee get cold.” The words rang on in Alice's ears with the dominant insistence of drum beats on a march. Alice had often been comforted by these expressions, which seemed to her the outward and visible sign of an inward care that she loved to think her children felt for her, but now she wondered how much it meant to Asia to say them, whether it mattered at all.

She did let her coffee get cold while she drifted into another conviction of failure so devastating that she would gladly have died as she lay there in bed.

Nothing but the fear that Asia might come in drove her finally to choke down as much as she could. In dismay she saw that there were four slices of toast when she could eat only one. As if she had been destroying criminal evidence she wrapped up the other slices in some paper and hid them in a bureau drawer till she could dispose of them later.

She dressed slowly and absent-mindedly, doing things in the wrong order, and fumbling as if she were recovering from an illness. After she had aired and made her bed and tidied up her room, she went out to sit in her veranda rocker on the shady side of the house, outside her window. The day was not yet far enough advanced for the heat to be uncomfortable, and a morning freshness still lingered above the river, which lay without a ripple below her. The scent of roses and honeysuckle filled the air about her. Plants and creepers grew and trailed about the veranda posts, so that she looked through a leafy frame away over the low lands into the western haze. The noises from the mill, the eternal reminder of the preeminence of her husband's brains, the embodiment of his vitality and his success, seemed to beat upon her ears with a more than usual arrogant aggressiveness.

For a long time she sat feeling too crushed to face or analyze the thing that had beaten her. All she could feel was that she was beaten.

By degrees she thought backwards over her life, but not in any sort of order or association or logical connection, and out of scrappy scenes she pieced an arraignment of herself, and some kind of explanation for her failure.

She was staggered to realize how little she knew of the people with whom she had lived. “You do not know human beings,” Bruce had said. Now that she was alive to this fact she began to remember things that strengthened it. There flashed among others into her memory the story of a girl who had been found dead in a gully at the foot of Pukekaroro some years before. The case had come before Harold Brayton, and Mrs. Brayton had hinted to her what the girl had died of. But the story had been told her only in a guarded way. She had never taken in the full force of it. She had learned nothing from it. She saw now that owing to her own attitude stories had always been told her in a guarded way, the decent way, she had supposed.

She wondered if there was any tragedy going on now under her unseeing eyes. “You do not know one-half of what has happened round you in this little place,” Bruce had said. She began to review her life in its relation to the village about the bay. She had seen it all grow out of the rushes and the coarse grass. She had seen every plot staked out. She had marked the progress from day to day of every little home—the planting of the houseblocks, the rapid running up of the frames, the weatherboarding, the roofing. Then she had watched for the families to come in. As it had been her duty to call on them she had always done so early in the first week, making herself as pleasant as she could, especially to the brides and bridegrooms, for whom she always felt an absurd sympathy, as if they were heading for some sorrow which she saw and they did not.

As Tom Roland had prospered, her sphere of benevolence had enlarged. The presents she took to the new babies became more ostentatious. She sent cakes and presents at Christmas time to the poorer families. When the bay school opened she became its patron. She went to the picnics and concerts, and gave out the prizes with nervous little speeches. She had been the Lady Bountiful of the village. She had been pleased to feel that she had entered into the lives of these people, that she had meant something to them in the way of an influence towards refinement and righteousness. She had liked to know that she was welcome in every house, that the children ran to meet her, that chairs were specially dusted for her to sit upon.

But now she saw that she had known only one side of these people, the side that mattered least, the party manner side. She had prided herself that people always behaved in her presence, that they took no liberties with her. She saw now that this meant that no one had ever come to her with a story of sin and shame, that no one had ever come to her with the cry “Help me” hot upon trembling lips. No one had ever come to her for the understanding that in desperate moments saves souls from despair.

She saw that every one had lied to her and she saw why. She saw that every one had conspired to shield her and she saw why. She saw that because she had shut herself off from life life had closed its gates to her. And she saw that she did not have to flee from life because life had maimed her, that she should have done as David Bruce had done, that she should have reached out to it, taken it with both hands and used it.

Slow tears ran unheeded down her cheeks as she saw that the scheme of respectability that she had preserved in the face of cruel odds was all wrong, that she had laboured for twenty years to build something that had been no real use to anybody, except, perhaps, as a comforting delusion to herself, that it had been merely a pleasant fiction to her, and that others had passed it by because it had touched their lives only in their lightest moments.

She wondered afterwards how she managed to face lunch. Fortunately for both her and Asia, Mabel and the children always came home from the bay school, and in the fuss of looking after them and getting them off again in time strained silences and forced conversations were eliminated.

Alice lay down afterwards for an hour or two, and then, drawing her chair to the east side, she sat down to continue her investigation. She was determined to see herself now as she was. She had thought she had become emancipated from much of her past. She had come home from the plays stirred about many things, her mind a ferment about the “intellectual assent,” the “special case,” individual rights. But her emotional reaction to the situation she had found in her own home had plunged her back into the arguments of Puritanism, to fixed principles, to inevitabilities, to all the bogies that follow in the train of fear and prejudice.

The more she thought about it the more she craved to get away from the people she had failed. She wondered how she could face them again with the full truth of her own futility crushing her. She asked herself what she meant to the members of her own family. Would Betty or Mabel come to her with their secret thoughts? Physically they were women now. How did they feel about it? She did not know. She had told them one or two essential facts. She suspected Asia had added to their knowledge, but what they realized of life she had no idea.

What was she to Bunty, a healthy roystering boy, at the intolerable age when everything feminine was beneath his notice, when a mother was the dragon who ordered him to wash his face, clean his boots, and go to bed at unkind hours? Would he come to her when life began to puzzle him?

What was she to Elsie, a sweet and gentle child, who played much alone, and never gave anybody any trouble. Did she see her mother as a remote personage who was not to be bothered, as somebody who occasionally graciously condescended to play with her, but who could never play her way? She remembered the child had been taught by Asia and the girls not to trouble her mother with her childish griefs.

What was she now to her husband—an attractive figurehead for the respectable family structure that in his own way he seemed to value, a woman admired by people whose education and position he was bound to respect because he knew they ran the world? If she meant any more to him than this she did not know.

What was she to Asia? She knew that Asia loved her; that she recognized “the bond,” and that she always would. She knew Asia valued her powers of endurance. She knew they were knit together by a common experience that meant inexpressible things to both of them. But what did she really mean to-day to the girl whom yesterday she thought she knew, and to-day saw that she had never known and perhaps never would know? What had she ever done for Asia except question every new move she had made, shake her head with the advent of each new idea, and oppose more or less openly her free and fearless ways?

She saw herself as an automaton who droned “don'ts” monotonously whenever any one pulled its string or poked it with an inquiring finger. In her imagination she conjured up the figure she thought she must now be in Asia's eyes—a sort of demon of caution enclosed in a wet blanket, with ominous arms pointing ever to disaster. She exaggerated its forbidding aspects till it became a Frankenstein.

She went over the things that she and Asia had talked about in the last few weeks—the garden, the weather, a summer cover for her bedroom chair, her new clothes, the sunsets, and meaningless gossip about people in Auckland and at the bay. She saw now that only bitter personal experience had brought her to realize the truth of Mrs. Brayton's words, spoken years before. In the throes of a momentous experience, torn by doubts and indecisions as her mother knew she must have been, Asia had chattered to her of flowers and the weather.

She began to wonder what she really was now to David Bruce. How could he love her if she was what she now seemed to herself to be? What had kept his affection the warm and beautiful thing it had been? Did she know him? She had been stunned the night before to think he would do the “infamous” things he said he had done. If she did not know David Bruce whom or what in the world did she know?

She asked herself what she was now to believe. She saw she would have to take stock again of her faith. Could she believe that a thing that Bruce would do was wrong? If she did believe it was wrong what was to be her attitude towards him? If she did not condemn him for doing wrong things could she condemn anybody else? How did one judge? What constituted the “special case”? Were Asia and Ross to be classified under that heading? And supposing it really was certain that they would never be found out, would she be so disturbed about their wrong-doing then? Further, would she not even be prepared to tolerate an action that would prevent their being found out? No, never, she told herself, and then again, yes.

Through all this torture of indecision she wanted passionately to do the right thing. She prayed that she might not settle into indifference, into the easiest way. Though she no longer prayed to gods who were abstractions in the sky, she cried out to something not of herself, to the god in a blind and struggling humanity, the something that keeps it struggling in spite of the blindness.

When David Bruce came to dinner he found her in the front room beside the window. In her eyes he read much of what she had been through, and he saw that she turned as she always had to him for the way out. It was a minute before she saw that he, too, had been scored by the night before.

“Oh, I hope you did not worry about me, David?” as she held out her hands to him.

“I thought about you. I could hardly help that.”

She noticed that his voice sounded tired and that he looked as if he had not slept. She forgot herself in thinking of him.

“Don't worry about me,” she commanded. “You have all got to stop worrying about me.”

A smile flitted across his eyes as he caught the new note of resolution.

He motioned to her to sit down, and took a chair near her. But he made no attempt to talk, knowing they would soon be interrupted. They both sat looking at each other wonderingly, but with the certainty that they meant the same to each other. Bruce was still asking himself how she had kept her story from him. She was still wondering what else there was about him she did not know. But the answers would have made no difference.

They did not talk much at dinner, but the children were accustomed to their quiet moods, and seeing that he was tired they thought nothing of it. Even Asia, absorbed in her own story, saw nothing unusual about their silence.

The sun was setting as they walked out to the veranda and drew chairs to their favourite place behind the rosetrees outside Alice's window. It had long been an accepted fact that they sat here undisturbed, unless it was by Roland, who occasionally sat there too, when he was at home. Asia had instilled into the minds of the rest of the family that the “elders” liked to be alone after dinner, and it was to her training that Bruce and Alice owed much of the privacy they enjoyed, a privacy they could not have arranged for themselves without attracting attention. Bruce had wondered many times whether it had been done innocently or with design. It was one of the things he admitted he did not know, and he admired Asia the more for being clever enough to keep the knowledge from him.

Soon after they settled themselves they saw her go down past the store, and along the spit to the little bridge that now spanned the channel to the other side. They watched her disappear into the bush, evidently to make her way up to the road and down to the cottage without passing through the mill grounds.

Bruce expected that Alice would make some appeal for sympathy, but she did not. She continued to stare into the sunset while he filled and lit his pipe. Presently he leaned towards her.

“Have you decided what you are going to do?”

She did not move as she answered, her eyes still fixed on the sunset:

“I suppose I must not speak—I see it might be no good—but I don't know what to do. I still feel I ought to do something. How can I sit on here and see her go every eveing—and know—and know——” Her voice fell away to a whisper.

“My dear,” he began very softly. “Don't you think that is just conceit? We are all such infernal egoists that we can't conceive that anything ought to go on without our assistance or resistance. We will think that we personally are so important to the march of progress, to the defeat of evil. We don't see that sometimes the best thing may be the elimination of ourselves.”

She turned her head slowly, and looked into his questioning eyes.

“You are right, David. That is one of the things that is the matter with me—oh, dear, so much is the matter with me.” Unexpectedly her voice ended in a sob.

He closed his hand upon her arm, and smiled at her.

“So much is the matter with most of us. You have no monopoly over the muchness.”

She recovered herself. She determined to keep her mind clear of emotionalism, for there were many things she wanted to ask him.

“Wouldn't you tell her, David? I have always felt that if a man came into her life she ought to know.”

“Why?”

“Well, it would make a difference to most men.”

“It would make a difference to most of us if we knew everything about everybody. If we didn't have delusions about most people we could not endure the sight of them. Considering we cannot see the whole of people, by all means let us see as much of the pleasant side as possible, and remain in ignorance of the things that might hurt us. I'm not so grim a realist that I would not throw dust in my own eyes if I could. The trouble with me is that I can't, so I have learned to take the truth as pleasantly as may be. But the Lord forbid that I should always be ramming so uncomfortable a thing down other people's throats. I only do it to avoid what looks like something still more uncomfortable. Now, why tell Asia? What good would it do her or Ross to know? What would the knowledge save them from? It would hardly stop them doing what they want to do, which would be your chief object in telling them.”

“But if you wouldn't tell them, David, you must think it would make a difference,” she persisted.

alice awoke one morning a few days later with a feeling that something was in the air. The first thing she remembered was that her husband was leaving early for Auckland, and that she must get up and pack his bag, one of the few wifely duties left to her. Then she remembered that she had heard the girls say the night before that Lynne was going by the same boat to meet a Sydney friend who was on a visit to New Zealand, and that he would be away a week or two.

Without waiting for Asia to call her she began to dress. Whenever she was well she rose for breakfast if Roland was leaving early to be away for any length of time. Along with a few things that she always did for him, such as darning his socks and putting his clothes away, she had carefully preserved certain courtesies. She accompanied him to the gate when he left for more than a day or two, and came to the door to meet him on his return. If she was away she telegraphed to tell him the day she was coming home. She continued to consult him about small purchases about which she knew he was now generous and indifferent. He had never remarked upon these things, nor had she. She did not know whether he would have missed them if they had been left undone.

The whole family sat down together to breakfast, which was in itself a sufficiently uncommon occurrence to brand the day as unusual. When he was home Roland rarely arranged his habits to suit the hour the children had to eat in order to get off in good time for school. As he was either early or late he usually ate alone, though when she felt like it Asia took pity on his loneliness and ate with him. But she had never made a habit of doing so. When she was away Betty and Mabel together shouldered the task of looking after him.

Breakfast with him had always been a difficult and unsatisfactory affair. Although he was not hard to please at dinner, his morning appetite was as uncertain as a choppy wind, and the person who had waited on him always had a sense of failure at the end of the meal, and a feeling of thankfulness when he left the table. He was more than usually irritable this morning because he had not been able to find his cheque-book, and a twenty minutes' search on the part of the whole household had failed to locate it. He swore he had not left it in the store—where it was found just as he was leaving—or in the bush, or with David Bruce. So they all sat down with the disagreeable sense that they were under suspicion for gross carelessness. The one person who did not really mind was Asia. Any sort of fuss or diversion, pleasant or unpleasant, meant that nobody noticed her, or made her more conscious of what lay ahead of her.

Alice minded the breakfast atmosphere less than she usually did. Once she would have allowed the pressure of her husband's irritability to weigh upon her. Now it struck her as being trifling and unreal. What did a lost chequebook matter? The scene moved before her as if she were looking at a picture. She felt an extraordinary detachment as she watched the members of her family. Tom Roland fussing every few minutes about his book, Betty and Mabel hurrying nervously because they were a little late, Bunty subdued and sulky because his father had accused him of mislaying the lost property, Elsie meek and silent because she shrank into herself in an uncongenial atmosphere, and Asia, the most unreal of them all, outwardly calm and managing, trying as she always did in such scenes to pour oil upon the troubled waters.

That two streams of events, the known and the unknown, could flow together under the same roof in the manner they were doing there before her eyes seemed to Alice to be incredible. She saw they were all mysteries to each other. She began to wonder what kept them together, whether anything ought to keep them together, whether “the bond” were not the most artificial of ties. And speculating about it, she ate more composedly than any one else. Though she did not dare to scrutinize Asia, she was aware of her poise, of her apparent elimination of herself, and she wondered how she could possibly be so normal with such a personal crisis hanging over her head.

An hour later Alice sat on the front veranda to watch Tom Roland and David Bruce leave in the launch. She followed them till she saw them stop at a point below the mill where two men got aboard. That puzzled her till she guessed that Ross would accompany Lynne to Point Curtis, and then return with Bruce. But when she saw the boat coming up the river again there was only one person in it, and it did not stop anywhere. It was not till the afternoon that she saw that this was part of a plan arranged beforehand.

She stayed out all the morning, making a pretence of gardening in the shade. She heard Asia humming and whistling as she worked inside, and wondered if she were doing it to keep her courage up, or to impress her mother, or whether it were the spontaneous overflow of real happiness. Alice felt no anger now against the lovers. Though she would still have stopped them if she had believed she safely could, she had made up her mind to be blind. She was now like a puppet; she would not move till they moved; and when they pulled the string she would dance to their tune, not enthusiastically or energetically, but, still, she would dance.

At lunch-time she managed to be more normal than she had expected she could be, and the quiet meal with Mabel and the children was such a contrast to the restless breakfast that both she and Asia remarked upon it with smiles. But they both avoided looking directly at each other, and each hoped the other did not notice it. Asia remembered vividly afterwards that her mother was pathetically gentle and soft, and that she had looked a great deal out of the window. They were helped to keep up by Mabel, who was in a vivacious mood, and talked of what she had to do for the school concert and picnic that was soon to close the term and inaugurate the summer holidays.

After lunch Alice lay down for an hour, but she could not even doze with the suspense hanging over her. She had to make an effort to stay in her room for the time she usually spent there. Then she took some sewing to the eastern veranda, and sat down facing the village and Pukekaroro. But she could not sew. Her hands fell limply into her lap, while she stared vacantly at one thing and another moving about the bay. She saw women take in their washing from the yards. She saw two men lazily fixing something on the tramway under the hot sun. She followed a rider down the road beside the line until he disappeared behind a low rise beyond the kitchen. She saw him reappear on the crest of the slope and ride slowly to the stables and dismount. Although she saw men ride thus every day, she wondered idly who he was.

She heard the children screaming through their afternoon recess in the school grounds, and the noise of hammers about the boat shed on the spit, and as a background for these sounds, the mill, its belts and saws and chains. Once, when a truckload of logs broke from the bush near the base of Pukekaroro, she roused herself to a keener attention. It seemed to her it was coming too quickly. She had learned to know the different kinds of roar made by the load coming fast or slow, and she always listened in some anxiety, for some of the worst accidents had occurred at the curve at the foot of the hill to men driving carelessly. But she saw she had anticipated as usual. The trucks disappeared behind the rise only to come merrily on across the flat and be braked to a standstill beside the booms.

Alice wondered how everything could be going on just the same. It seemed to her incredible that nothing should be altered there now that she had seen something of what went on below the surface. She wondered if any other mother there were facing the tragedy of seeing a child plunge into uncertainties.

After four o'clock she heard steps through the house and the front gate click. Stung to wide-awakeness she swung her chair round. She saw Asia go down the path to the store. But she was still wearing the blue print dress she had worn that morning, and she went hatless, with nothing in her hands. Presently she returned laden with packages of groceries. Instead of taking them straight inside she came round the veranda to her mother. She was breathless, apparently from hurrying up the hill.

“Mother, a man has just come up from a new family below Point Curtis to ask for help. His wife is very ill. I said I'd go.”

She said it so naturally that for the moment Alice believed her.

“Oh, dear”—she raised her face from her sewing—“who is it?”

Asia did not hesitate as she looked into her mother's eyes and down at a slipping package.

“Haywood; he said the name was. Uncle David said I could tell what it was, and send for him if necessary.”

“Oh, yes.” Alice bent over her sewing with a curious feeling of perplexity.

“Mother, if it was typhoid or pneumonia or anything like that I might stay for a few days. You can get Mrs. North or Eliza King. But there won't be much to do. I did some cooking this morning.”

Then Alice saw.

She ran her needle into her finger, and leaned down while she put it in her mouth. Prepared though she thought she would be to meet the trial when it came, she felt a rush of pain through her body. But she was able to answer in a voice that did not betray her state of mind:

“Certainly. You must stay as long as they need you.” Something in her rose to play the game. “You will need some old linen, and you had better take some jelly—I'll get it.”

She got up quickly, dropping her sewing in the chair. She felt she had to move, to do something. Asia turned with her, walking a little ahead. Her face was flushed, and she could not look at her mother. She kept arranging the packages under her arm as if it were difficult to carry them.

“Now, don't do any work, Mother. There's no necessity——” she began, as they entered the hall.

“Oh, Asia, will you cease worrying about me—I—I—really—I can look after myself.”

Asia was arrested by the irritation in her mother's voice, and she was misled by her manner into thinking she suspected nothing. It had the effect of diverting her for the moment, and clearing the air between them. She really thought her mother was becoming more independent, and that she now disliked being fussed over.

“Oh, all right,” she answered, in a tone meant to placate, and walked on to the kitchen.

Inside her room Alice pressed her fingers into her temples to ward off the blackness that swept before her eyes. She took up her smelling salts, which helped her to steady herself. Mechanically she began to look for old linen, with a reactionary feeling that she need not have gone so far in aiding and abetting the lovers. But she made up a bundle, and taking it to the kitchen, she found two pots of jelly, and placed them with it on the table. Calling out where she had left them, she returned to the veranda, praying that Asia would get ready and go quickly. She hoped this would be one of the times when Mabel and the children would go up the Kaiwaka road to meet Betty, and that it would be over before they got home.

A quarter of an hour later she heard Asia come to the front door, put something down, and come on round the veranda. As she turned the corner Alice saw that she had changed into her plain old navy suit, and that her hair was neatly arranged under a sailor hat. She was dressed and looked exactly as she always did when she went on such visits as the one she had described. Alice dared not look directly at her, but she was stupidly conscious of her carefully quiet manner and her extraordinary poise.

Steeling herself, she determined to be equally calm.

“I hope you won't find it very serious.” She looked past Asia's face, pretending to be attracted by something on her hat.

“I hope not.” Asia could not elaborate the statement. Cool though she appeared to be she was inwardly seething with emotion, and anxious to get away as soon as possible without seeming too abrupt. “Good-bye, Mother. Don't garden in the sun, and don't bother cooking hot meals for the children. Give them cold stuff till I come back.”

This further solicitude almost upset Alice. She dared not speak; she merely nodded her head as she put out her cheek for Asia to kiss. The caress was one of the most perfunctory they had ever bestowed upon each other. Hardened by the dread of reaction neither of them dared make even a show of affection. Without another word Asia turned quickly and disappeared round the veranda.

Alice stood in a daze watching her go down the path. She saw that she carried a light straw case, and that she walked as she always walked, with a free swinging stride. Just before she reached the blacksmith's shop she turned round, and seeing her mother looking after her, she waved her hand.

Tears gushed from Alice's eyes as she waved back. That the familiar greeting should not have been forgotten in that tragic moment touched her to the core. She began to sob, and, sobbing, walked inside to her room. She did not want Asia to think she was watching to see where she went. She saw her cross the spit bridge and enter the bush at the accustomed place. She did not know that once she was alone out of sight among the ferns and trees Asia sat down on her case and shed sad tears, not on account of anything ahead of her, but of sorrow for that she had left behind.

the autumn set in late after the unusually hot summer, remembered afterwards as one of the worst for fires that the north had ever known. For two months Tom Roland kept bands of fighters ready for any emergency, and he was fortunate in escaping with nothing worse than some bad scares, two small burns, and the loss of one camp outfit. For weeks at a time the pall of smoke rolling up from the fires started on the gum-fields, in clearings and on waste lands, obliterated the horizons. The low, scrub-covered ground opposite the mill inside the turn of the river below Roland's house, had blazed for one week, raising showers of sparks that were watched anxiously lest they should carry across. The smoke from this section filled the houses about the bay so that everybody tasted it on their tongues when they woke in the morning.

There had been one weird period of several days when the late afternoon sun had seemed to step out of the great curtain behind it and to be rapidly approaching the earth with the awful ominousness of some bulging blood-red eye in a monster mad with the lust for wholesale destruction. Men stopped work to look at it, and women shivered as with a presentiment of evil. Its appearance was so extraordinary that the newspapers sought to find causes for it, and concluded that the huge fires going on in Australia at the same time accounted for the phenomenon.

As she sat much alone Alice felt there was some correspondence between the behaviour of the seasons and the happenings in her own little world. It seemed fitting to her that that particular summer and autumn should be out of the ordinary. The constant anxiety about fire on the part of her husband and David Bruce paralleled her restlessness. Those abnormal suns intensified the sense of unreality she had had about her life since the day she knew that Asia and Allen Ross had begun to live together.

It was not until more than two months of the relation had gone by that she began to accept it as something more than an excrescence on her experience. Then it began to fit in, to flow along with other things in her daily life.

She had managed to be so noncommittal after Asia's first return that they had both started without embarrassment upon the course they had since pursued. Alice had accepted without question the tale Asia told about the Haywoods. She had met Ross at tea two days later, taking her cue from the normal behaviour of the lovers. As time went on she had had relapses into amazement at their unruffled demeanour, moments of fear that they might be discovered, short periods of envy for their youth and courage, every kind of ebb and flow of emotion and decision about them. But all through she had outwardly preserved a serenity that completely deceived them, and that was praised as wonderful by David Bruce.

The lovers had been most discreet. Ross had come alone or with Lynne to dinner many times. He had never betrayed himself, nor had Asia. They had not shut themselves up to each other. They had joined in trips to the bush, in fire-fighting expeditions, in parties of various kinds. When they had gone alone in the launch up the river they arranged their start so that they were not seen leaving together. Ross always waited at or near the dell. When they went sailing down the river Lynne accompanied them so far, and landing below the gap, walked back through the bush. Bruce assured Alice that they might go on for a year like that, and that no one would suspect. If Roland thought anything about them, he never mentioned it.

This elimination of immediate danger affected Alice. She saw that it was bringing her to think differently of their action. She found herself wondering if, after all, the spiritual values they got did not justify them. She usually fell back from heresies of this kind into questions as to where it would end if everybody did as they were doing. But she watched them as much as she dared with interest, and sometimes with fascination.

One night towards the end of March she felt her loneliness and restlessness more than usual. It was the brown dress night, and she had almost come to believe that it had an uncanny influence over her. As she would have expressed it, it gave her the fidgets. If she had been a different type of woman she would have said it made her feel “naughty,” “wicked,” or “like the devil”; but, though she had heard such expressions on the mischievous lips of Dorrie Harding, it never occurred to her to use them, even in fun.

She had dressed carefully, knowing that Ross was coming to dinner, and hoping that Bruce would get down from the bush. But his failure to appear had put a note of disappointment into the meal, which seemed to her to have been unsatisfactory to the lovers also, because Roland, who was in a garrulous mood, monopolized the conversation with tedious repetitions of his fire-fighting exploits. She thought Asia and Ross were unusually quiet. She knew that Ross was soon to return to Sydney, and she rightly guessed that they hated to think that that summer of romance had to end. As she saw them go off together afterwards she could not help feeling sorry for them, seeing the inevitable changes they had to face.

After Roland had departed for the evening to visit the captain of a timbership that had arrived that afternoon, Alice sat down outside her window, leaving her children studying as usual in the dining-room. The night, heavy with smoke, was sultry and enervating, and yet had a curious goad in it that prevented one's giving way to it with pleasant limpness. There was also a haunting foreboding of winter, intensified by the crickets, that in keeping with the other exaggerations of the season were that year more numerous than ever. They seemed to Alice to chirp with a mournfulness worse than anything she had ever heard. She had not sat long before they and something in the night got on her nerves.

Getting up, she walked off down the front steps and round into the back garden, where she began to pace backwards and forwards along the centre path. The night settled down quickly, hastened by the smoke. Stars were visible only vaguely at the zenith. She began to stop at intervals to listen for sounds that might tell of Bruce's return. But though the night was very still she could hear nothing that resembled a horse's hoofs down the road.

She could never tell afterwards what it was that drove her out of the garden and along the path to his shanty. She knew that unless it was very late when he returned he would come to see her, for she had not seen him at all that day. Although it was long after the time when she had ever gone alone in the evening to see him, she felt she could not wait. All that was in her mind was the idea that she would see if he were there, and that if he were she would bring him back with her.

When she got near his shanty she paused at the sound of scrappy whistling. Then she saw a faint sheen of light radiating from his doorway. She listened to hear if he had any one with him. As she did so a shadow crossed the light, and a stream of water thrown from a dish careered out into the night and splashed upon the dry earth. Hearing no other sounds, she was reassured and went on.

David Bruce was standing in front of his mirror adjusting a tie when he heard her step on the porch.

“You,” he said, “I was just coming along.” He gave her a quick, curious look, wondering what had happened.

She stood in his doorway as if she were waiting to be asked in.

“I didn't hear you ride down, David.” Though her voice was natural she felt uncertain and nervous.

“No? I came slowly. The road is very dusty.”

“Have you had your dinner?”

without seeing Alice, Roland and Bruce left together in the morning for the bush. Though he saw at once that the boss did not want to make any reference to the night before, Bruce could not let it go at that, and as soon as they had cleared the kitchen grounds he said he wished to say something about it.

“Go ahead, then,” said Roland uncomfortably, looking in front of him. “But I've nothing more to say. I said all I think about it last night.”

Something about this blunt discouragement and the boss's comical discomposure amused Bruce. He laughed, but rather harshly.

“Upon my soul, Tom, do you think you can finish up things like that? Good God! You must have done some thinking to come to this, and some suffering. And all I want to say is I know it, and I thank you for feeling about me as you do. There are things that can't be put into words, and I don't try to put them there, but common decency demands that one show something occasionally. And whether you like it or not, I'm going to say I understand and appreciate your attitude.”

The unemotionalism in his tone relieved Roland, who was more pleased by his words than he could have showed. He was perfectly willing to be praised. His childish vanity was capable of lapping up oceans of honeyed words. But he did hate anything that upset his comic-opera view of life.

“That's all right,” he grunted. “There are things I could say if I knew how to say them, but I can't.”

“All right,” smiled Bruce. He saw he would have to find other ways of showing how he felt about it, if any such were left him. All day his thoughts reverted to the boss, and to his curious inconsistencies. He speculated about his mental processes, his preoccupation with action, his absence of any power to analyse motives or tendencies. Roland had always appeared to settle things easily, guided by some secret spring of intuition that took him straight to a conclusion while other people wrestled painfully with their souls about it. Bruce had always admired his inexhaustible fund of common sense, and he suspected that it was his common sense combined with his sense of fairness, rather than any reasoned philosophy about morals, that had brought him to the point of view he had with regard to himself and Alice.

When they returned to the bay on the third evening Ross and Lynne were staying to dinner, and nothing in the situation was allowed to obtrude itself upon that meal. Bruce noticed, however, that Alice seemed dull, and that she looked at him from eyes that gave signs of sleeplessness.

Afterwards Roland took Lynne off to one of the timber vessels to see a captain who had some good stories to tell. Asia and Ross disappeared. Telling Alice that he had to finish up something at the store and would be back presently, Bruce also went off down the path. When he closed up the office, about half-past eight, he found the lovers sitting outside on the tramway, waiting for him.

“Come on the beach a minute. I want to ask you something,” said Asia.

Wondering what it was, he turned with them. They all walked the few yards to the end of the cliffs in silence. But as soon as they reached the sandy beach, and were screened from sight, Asia stopped.

“What is the matter with Mother? Has she found out about us?” she asked, her eyes fixed inquiringly upon his face looming over her in the dark.

“Why do you ask that?” He returned her questioning look.

“She has been dreadfully worried for days. You have been away, so you haven't noticed. I don't know of anything else that could have upset her. But I didn't want to say anything until I was sure, for I would have preferred to wait till Allen went away. But if she has found out we both feel we would rather talk it out with her at once. Allen insists on doing his share of it.”

Then Bruce saw that they had both screwed up their courage to face the trying ordeal. He looked away from them, but even in the dark they were conscious of the smile that lit up his eyes.

“Uncle David, why do you look like that?”

As he turned to them again, his glance fleeting back and forth between them, they realized that he had something to tell them.

“Asia, my dear, your mother has known about you and Allen from the beginning. She knew you were going to him that day you left for the mythical Haywoods. She knew when she got you the linen and the jelly.”

He saw plainly how astonished they were.

“What do you mean?” exclaimed Asia.

“Just what I say.”

“She has known all along!” she repeated.

“She has.”

“And you knew she knew?”

“Well, why not?” he smiled.

Asia and Ross looked at each other, and back to him, and back at each other again, saying nothing, but thinking the same things.

“Did you tell her?” she asked, after an eloquent silence.

“I did not.”

“Then she only suspected.”

“No, she really knew. There are some things you can't keep from the people who love you, you know.” His eyes still smiled at them.

“She knew!” she repeated slowly, looking at Ross. “Then she knew when she met us at tea and dinner all the time. I can't believe it. And we thought we were so smart at putting her off the scent, we were so careful how we behaved, how we looked at each other. And she knew! Uncle David, really——” She broke off, seeing that he was enjoying her amazement.

“And after all, you were the deceived party,” he drawled. “Your poor benighted, out-of-date mother was clever enough to fool you.”

He wished Alice could have seen their faces at that moment. Ross looked humbly at Asia.

“I always felt there was something about your mother we were missing,” he said.

With a flushed face she turned to Bruce.

“I think you ought to have told me about this before,” she said crossly.

But he was obviously amused.

“Why should I? You know I have never talked back and forth between you and your mother. You thought it best she shouldn't know, and she thought it best you shouldn't know she knew. And there you were. What was I to do?”

Ross nodded his understanding.

Asia looked down at the sand, and dug her heels and toes into it for some minutes.

“How does she feel about it then? You can tell me that now.” Her eyes searched his.

“She has left you both on the lap of the gods,” he replied quietly.

He was amused to see that these two people who had been so sure of themselves, so ready to defend their rights and principles, should be so subdued at this information.

“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,’” he quoted lazily.

And to that they had nothing to say.

“I would talk to her about it when you feel like it,” went on Bruce, looking at her. “You might find out something if you did, and I have come to think it would be a pity if you went away without knowing her.”

the sun was setting in a sky cleared by recent rains and fresh winds, which had carried off the smoke clouds and left the hills sharp against the horizon. As Alice waited on the veranda for Asia to tell her that dinner was ready, she watched the colours flame up and deepen in the sky, and as she watched them she felt again the curious vacant feeling that had haunted her during the day. She wondered why the departure of Ross and Lynne two days before had left the place so empty, and she knew that if she noticed it as much as she did that Asia must have been feeling it much more.

The Australians had had a part in her awakening that summer. They had been interwoven, unknown to themselves, into the new material of her aroused interest in the world about her. She had been stirred by their vitality and their enthusiasm. She had begun by resenting them. Now she was sorry to see them go.

She had been ready to sympathize with Asia, but she soon saw that she desired no appearance of mourning. To be suppressed in this direction gave Alice a strange feeling of the artificiality of their relations. She had been in a mood to go deep, but Asia had preferred to dabble in the shallows, and pretend she was unconcerned, and that she was not lonely. This was because she was afraid her mother would over-emotionalize anything that she might say. All day Alice had had a suspensive feeling which she remembered vividly afterwards. She had wondered how she would get through the month or so before Asia left, and still more how she would live on the years ahead.

But the thing that troubled her most was that with David Bruce still left to her, as much hers as he had ever been, she should be afraid of the future. The “spiritual friendship” had filled her life once. She could not understand why it did not fill her life now.

As she watched the mackerel sky change from gold to rose she saw David Bruce coming along his path, and she was glad that he would be there to dinner. She went down to the gate to meet him.

“Is Tom coming?” she asked, knowing they had been together in the bush.

“He said he was when I left him two hours ago.” He mounted the steps beside her.

“I gave him the letter this morning, David.”

“You did,” he smiled. “I wondered what was the matter with him.”

“Why, what——”

“Oh, he was unusually quiet, that was all.”

They sat down. He began to tell her of a cave one of the men had discovered the day before in the bush. As he talked they heard the beginnings of a rumble about the base of Pukekaroro, and turning their heads, they saw a load of logs break from the low bush and come on down the tramway.

“That will be Tom,” he said, and brushing aside the thought that the boss was driving too fast, he continued his story. “There may be some valuable greenstone in it. It's an old burying place——”

His head shot round, and he sprang to his feet.

Startled, Alice jumped up with him.

The dull roar of the trucks down the hill had suddenly ceased. An instant's sharp silence was followed by a crash of splitting wood, mingled with the snapping and jangling of chains. There was one short echo round the bay and then a piercing stillness.

Straining their eyes, they could see nothing, for the load had disappeared behind the rise.

“My God!” muttered Bruce underneath his breath, as he sprang down the steps.

late that night David Bruce stood alone in Bunty's room beside Tom Roland's body. Outwardly it looked like any other body laid out beneath a sheet, except that there were no hands to fold upon the breast. Bruce and one or two of the men had had a sickening task trying to make it look presentable, but they had succeeded so well that there was no aggressive sign of the mangled thing it had been. The white face looked extraordinarily dead, lacking the fierce eye fire of the living man. Only his reddish hair, now dulled with grey, bristled still as if it would make a fight for life. His square jaw was set in death as it had been in life, but there was a pathetic sensibility upon his strong features that now softened his expression, a something of appeal that arrested Bruce as he leaned over him to pin the handkerchief to the pillow.

Since the body had been carried there no one but Bruce had seen it. Alice, knowing she could not bear to look upon him, had stayed in her room, asking Asia to see that she was left alone. Not even Bruce was to be admitted to see her that night. Asia broke the news to Betty and Mabel, who, remembering only their father's more generous and cheerful years, were stricken with this first contact with death, and went to bed to cry in each other's arms. They were only too glad to be assured by Asia that no conventions required them to look upon their father's body. Asia saw no reason why she herself should see it. She would have done anything for it that had to be done in the name of decency and respect, but she could not pretend that she had any sentiment to spénd upon it.

Bruce went in for more reasons than one. He knew the body had lain alone, and he had sentiment about it. He had just come from going round the bay. He had visited every family, had talked to most of the men, and had given such consolation as he could. He knew that if Tom Roland's body had lain in any house but its own it would have had a weeping crowd about it all night long, that the only dry eyes were those of the two women who had known him best, and that, while every other home about the bay was crushed with shock and helpless with grief, here there was already the sense of immense relief and the beginnings of readjustment.

This aloofness of his family from him in his death struck Bruce as one of the saddest things that he had ever known. The fact that he understood the reasons for it did not make it any the less sad. He knew well enough that any show of feeling on the part of Alice would have been indecent. All she could do was to be still. But he himself had been the boss's friend, curiously partial though that friendship had been. He had not yet recovered from the shock of seeing that dominant thing wiped out in an instant. It still seemed incredible that it should be gone. He realized that the stillness that hung over the house was more than the stillness of death, that it was also the stillness of the passing of Tom Roland.

And thinking of it, he wondered what Roland's death meant to himself apart from the freedom it gave to him and Alice. He did not feel personal grief of the kind that makes one wonder how life is to be faced without the friend now gone. He felt as if some landmark he had cared about with the affection one can bestow sometimes upon an inanimate thing had been suddenly destroyed by a storm. He had the sense of loss one has at missing a familiar object that one has had around for years. It was more physical than mental. Roland's energy had always been a stimulus to Bruce, like a strong wind ever blowing and forcing one to move with it.

Bruce surveyed their partnership as he stood there. They had had a certain kind of intimacy that went deep, that had rarely found expression in words. It was the understanding of two men, male animals, for the physical problems they had to face. Tom Roland had always felt that David Bruce understood as no one else did the goad of his own rampant vitality. For that understanding there was little he would not have done for his partner. But only on the evening in Bruce's room had any evidence of feeling on the subject come up between them. Now Bruce knew that the boss had loved and respected him with probably the finest feeling that had entered into his mixed emotions.

Their business relations had been their common ground of interest. In the main they had agreed about their plans, and they had readily compromised where they differed. They had the same sense of justice and of fairness. They had respected each other's judgment. They had been amused at the same things in the men, at the same incongruities in the happenings of everyday life. Business had inspired them with a mutual admiration for work well done, for promises promptly kept, for adjustments honourably made, for problems pluckily met and solved. In all their years of association they had never had a dispute. They had been a splendid working team. Bruce had supplied more of the ideas than any one ever knew, but he was more than willing to let Roland have the spectacular part of putting them into effect. Bruce was interested in the idea; Roland in getting credit for the result. Both had been satisfied.

Intellectually they had never met. As far as Bruce knew, the only book the boss had read in years was The Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son. He had never had any ideals for humanity. Such improvements as he had made at the bay were those of the benevolent despot who finds a vast emotional satisfaction in the praise and gratitude of immediate dependents. Roland had loved doing good only where he could be sure of getting the eye-shine and hand-shake in return. The great movements of the world had left him not only untouched, but absolutely ignorant of their tendencies and power. But he had met what he called the fads of young people without hostility, with a good deal of tolerant amusement, and with the remark that they might as well do what pleased them for a while, because he was certain that as they grew older life would round them up and put them in the safe line of sober judgment.

Though Roland had responded, apparently without forethought, to his own impulses, he had been generous, as far as Bruce knew, in dealing with the results. He had paid well for all his fun, and he had kept his respect for the women and girls he had lived with, having, as his one radical accomplishment, a single standard for the sexes. He gave women the right to do as he did, and when it came to the supreme test of his philosophy, he was prepared to take, as he had shown, the same stand towards his wife.

These things David Bruce thought over as he looked upon him, and he wondered that with so much known so much should still remain unknown about him. After fixing the window and seeing that nothing would rattle or blow about if a wind arose, he went out, locking the door behind him.

He found Asia in the dining-room waiting to give him something to eat. They began to talk at once of how they were to manage the inquest and the funeral, and not a personal word was said. Then Bruce lay down as he was on the front room couch. As they all lay awake they could hear, at intervals, the sounds of hammering on the spit, where the head carpenter and his staff worked all night on a labour of love, the coffin, the most elegant coffin the bay had ever seen, made of the choicest bits of mottled kauri from Roland's private collection.

As Asia thought, and remarked only to Bruce, the boss would have been delighted with the stir caused by his death. Glorified details of his dying were telegraphed all over the colony, to become the subject of many a sermon. Resolutions of sympathy for the sorrowing family were passed by dozens of organizations. One man sat at the store telephone for two days taking down the telegrams that poured in upon Alice and Bruce. An urgent wire arrived the morning after his death from Auckland to say that fifty leading business men of the city would come to the funeral, and later in the day a message was received to say that a big delegation of timber men would come by launch from the Wairoa.

After breakfast people began to flock to see him. Asia took upon herself the task of receiving them and showing them into the room where the body lay, and of seeing that they did not stay too long, and of managing them generally. That was something Alice felt she could not face, and she spent the day sitting in her own room, listening to the ceaseless procession of steps up and down the hall. In the afternoon a party of fifty children from the two schools, with their teachers, all carrying wreaths and crosses of wild flowers, came awed and sobbing to look upon the face of the man who had always been the life of the school picnics, the donor of most of the prizes, and as an amateur conjurer the most applauded of their entertainers at the concerts at night. To many of them, in whose homes he had been a little god, he was Uncle Tom, the lovable deity who always had a threepenny bit to spare, and who made jumping bunnies for them and shadows on the wall. It was this procession of children that brought to Alice's eyes the only tears she shed that day. And she wondered how a man who had always been so irritable with his own should be so loved by the children of everybody else.

It was not till the evening of that first day after the accident that Mrs. Lyman appeared. As they sat trying to eat in the dining-room, they saw her drive up in her well-known little yellow gig. With a quick look at her mother, Asia got up at once. But she was surprised to see Alice rise and wave her down.

“I will meet her,” she said quietly.

Asia shot a look at David Bruce, who refused to see any-thing,anything for Betty and Mabel were no longer oblivious of signs. So she was left to her own speculations.

Alice and Mrs. Lyman had met at shows, where the florid, black-eyed landlady of the Hakaru public house had somewhat paraded her ascendancy over the boss in a manner that had more than once disgusted his wife with him as well as with her. Alice had seen in Mrs. Lyman nothing more than a vulgar harridan who was only one stage removed from a prostitute. She had felt at times in years gone by, when her husband's infidelity had hurt her, that she could have understood his carrying on with a beautiful or seductive woman, but she never could see how a man who had been attracted by her could also be attracted by a type so utterly different from her own.

But her feeling about Mrs. Lyman had altered. She knew she was as vulgar as ever as she looked at her standing in the doorway, dressed ostentatiously in black to show the world that she considered she had as good a right as any one to mourn for the dead. Once Alice would have called her mourning brazen, but now she wondered if it were not a sign of a real courage. The bay and the countryside had always forgiven the boss his sins in so far as it was aware of them, but Alice knew from Bruce that Mrs. Lyman had been pretty generally ostracised for years by all the members of the community who claimed to be respectable. Alice knew the bay would condemn her, but she herself felt only a pity for this primitive woman who was willing to take risks for the man she loved, and who was now left bereft of the one human being upon whom she had lavished her affections for years. She wondered if it were not greater to dare all deliberately for a thing beloved than to deny feeling as she herself had done. Who was to judge?

Mrs. Lyman glared at Alice. She had hoped Tom Roland's wife would be in retirement. She knew David Bruce would receive her courteously if he were there, but she had been a little afraid of Asia, even though Asia had never snubbed her, and so, partly in self-defence, she had brought a large cross of white hydrangeas that she had taken half the day to make, feeling that that offering could hardly be refused. She was amazed to see Alice come forward and hold out her hand.

“Come in, Mrs. Lyman,” she said gently. “It was kind of you to come.”

Kind! Mrs. Lyman wondered if she had heard aright, and her courage, ferocious in attack, evaporated immediately before the possibility of having nothing to do. She could not even frame the first sentence she had planned. All she could do was to hold out the cross.

“That is beautiful,” Alice went on, “but you would like to see him, and put it with him yourself, wouldn't you?”

“Yes, please,” choked Mrs. Lyman, dissolving into tears at this unexpected reception. Feeling that something had put her dreadfully in the wrong for the moment, she followed Alice to the door of Bunty's room.

“I will see that you are not disturbed for a while,” said Alice, and as she spoke she put her hand for a minute on Mrs. Lyman's shoulder. Then she motioned her to go in, closing the door behind her. And for some time afterwards Alice felt as if she had at last got into the flow of the great human current that carries all men, great and small, towards some goal of understanding and goodwill which they see as in a glass darkly.

At the end of half an hour Mrs. Lyman stole out like a guilty thing, her veil drawn over her face. As she stumbled on to the veranda she came face to face with Asia and Bruce, who were talking to people waiting there to view the body. Asia at once held out her hand, and Bruce walked round with her to help her into her gig.

Suffering a reaction from her temporary humility, Mrs. Lyman tried to console herself as she drove home.

“I must say I didn't expect that from 'er,” she said, “and 'er the cold thing she is. Oh, Lord! Why did 'e 'ave to die? The only thing I 'ad. I ought to 'ave been 'is wife, not 'er, if things 'ad been as they should be. And 'e knew it. It was me 'e wanted, not 'er, and 'e would 'ave married me if 'e could 'ave got a divorce from 'er. That's this world for yer!”

One of the things Mrs. Lyman had never learned from Roland had been his thoughts about his wife, other than the bare fact that she did not love him, nor had she ever heard from him a hint as to the possible relations of his wife and Bruce. Roland had had his delicacies of feeling and his points of honour.

“Poor soul,” said Bruce, speaking of her later in the evening to Alice. “She loved him, and she never looked at any one else. She will be the loneliest thing in the place for some time. And she did something for him. She was a good cure for polygamy.”

“David!” Alice was shocked, though she could not have said why.

“Well, my dear, she really has kept him monogamous, I believe, for the last three years. Don't you think that's a good thing?”

She gave him a strange look.

“I am glad he had her, David. I'm glad he had something he really wanted.”

She looked down at her hands.

They were sitting in the front room, expecting no one else to come that night. Asia had retired a few minutes before, and the house was now still. It was filled with an overwhelming conglomerate smell of the flowers that had been brought in that day, and although all the windows were open the air was heavy and sense deadening.

Neither Alice nor Bruce had any intention of coming to themselves so soon, but the mention of Mrs. Lyman had brought to her mind something she had thought of many times that day.

She had guessed there would be plenty of money, and already her thoughts had turned to it and to what she could do with it. Although she had never seen her husband's will she knew from Bruce that he had made one, and she knew that whether he had or not, under the New Zealand laws the bulk of his money and property would belong to her and the children.

“David, do you know if he left her any money?” she asked, raising her face.

“Mrs. Lyman?”

She nodded.

“Not in the will I've seen, the only one so far as I know.” He looked curiously at her. Her face looked whiter because of the black dress she was wearing, but there was something about her eyes that held him. He was interested in the way in which she was keeping herself and him in the background.

“There's plenty of money, isn't there?” she asked, and he saw what she was coming to.

“Plenty.”

“Then, David, I'd like her to have some, to think he left it to her, quite a good sum, please. Can you manage that?”

Full of her own thoughts she did not see the significance of the light that shot across his eyes, or notice the quality of his tone as he answered shortly:

“Yes.”

Soon she saw that his thoughts were not concentrated as they should have been upon the carrying out of her designs. His eyes were fixed upon her face with one of his inscrutable expressions, a compound of hunger and tenderness and the sternness of voluntary, renunciation. She looked back at him doubtfully till his eyes flamed suddenly, and then she rose with him and felt herself melt into his arms.

But he had not held her crushed against him for many minutes before he remembered. Stiffening, he stood still, merely holding her face against his. Then he drew away from her.

“Oh, Lord!” he exclaimed, disgusted with himself. “Poor Tom. I did mean to wait till after the funeral.” Then he regarded her reproachfully, as if she had been to blame. “Keep away from me,” he said with a comical sternness. “It will be at least two weeks before I have time to deal adequately with you.”

For days he carried with him the memory of the smile with which she had answered his words.

Roland's funeral far outshone that of Mrs. Brayton. To the people she had been a vision, a luxury; but the boss had been a plain fact, a necessity, something that went with their food and clothes and simple pleasures.

The entire population for a radius of twenty miles came to it. In the mellow warmth of the still late autumn day they sat out in the field, and along the spit, and on the tramway. Those who drove were in charge of a committee of men who placed them in the order of their coming to fall later into line for the Kaiwaka cemetery, where, as the day was fine, Alice and Bruce decided that the service should be held so that more could hear it.

It took Bruce and Harold Brayton and Bob Hargraves and Asia, and a committee working under them, four hours to arrange a programme that should provide for all who had not seen the coffin to see it, and to place all with some attention in the funeral procession. By midday everybody had been disposed into groups and their order fixed. Then they waited only for the arrival of the Auckland merchants, who had telegraphed their progress at intervals along the road. When at last their three big brakes drawn by teams of four horses were seen swinging round the base of Pukekaroro, there was a stir through the whole crowd of mourners, and a feeling of relief at this break in the tension.

At one o'clock the procession started.

Roland's coffin, loaded with flowers, and followed by three buggy loads of wreaths and crosses, was carried in relays on the shoulders of the oldest workers. The first eight, which included Shiny, were men who had grown grey in his service, all having been with him since the month of his beginnings in that bush. Round them in a sort of square marched the other pall-bearers. Immediately following them walked David Bruce, Harold Brayton, Bob Jones, who sobbed at intervals, Bob Hargraves, and Asia, the only member of his family who was present. She did not want to go, but she felt she ought to represent her mother, to whom it would have been an ordeal so trying that they decided she should not go.

Following this little section of the people nearest to the dead man walked the Auckland and the Wairoa delegations. Then came the lines, over a quarter of a mile long, of engineers, saw men, mill and bush hands, tramway and general workers, and behind them their families. The school children with their teachers followed, and after them the general public, among whom Mrs. Lyman drove, heavily veiled, in a long, straggling wave of vehicles. Seen from the house on the cliffs the coffin was out of sight on the road at the base of Pukekaroro before the last buggies had fallen in from the field.

The ministers of four of the local denominations assisted to bury Tom Roland, and to hold him up as an example of a noble and successful citizen, pointing a moral for all in the heroic sacrifice of his end.

Immediately after the funeral a public meeting was arranged to consider plans for the erection of a monument to his memory. At this meeting it was decided without argument that the anniversary of his death should be a public holiday in the bay school for ever, and that the story should be told every year of how and why he died. There was a three months' dispute as to whether the monument should be erected on the spot where he had died or above his grave. Finally the advocates of the cemetery won the day.

once again Alice watched by her western window for a boat to come through the gap on the river.

It was the first week in May, when in the southern latitudes nature calls a halt between the anticipativemelancholy of autumn and the winter's onslaught of wind and rain, and gives a consolation prize of a week or two of days filled with crystal sunshine and clear stillness, days when life carries one along on winged feet, days of dreams and visions and those wonderful ambitions that are too vast to be ever pinned down afterwards within the narrow limits of action, days when one forgets death and disruption, pain and disillusionment, and sees only that the world is very good.

It was the afternoon, but there was no haze anywhere, and the hills high and low stood out sharp against the sky. There was no motion among the forest trees and only the suggestion of a ripple on the river. Tom Roland had been buried over two weeks, and the bay had taken up its daily round again, so that outwardly it seemed the same. The mill hummed and screamed its dominance through the days as it had done before. New vessels had come to take the places of the loaded ones beside the wharves.

As yet nothing had been altered, but to Alice it had taken on a new form and meaning. It now belonged to her, to her and David Bruce.

As she looked at the low hills that lay like a band of indigo on the western horizon, she remembered the times she had cried out to them, seeing in them the guardians of the water highway that was to her the way out, the road to a vague land of promise about which she had sometimes allowed herself to dream. She had looked at them as a prisoner in a valley dungeon might look through bars at a neighbouring mountain pass, wondering if he would ever go that way to life and freedom. Now that she knew she could go any day she chose, she wondered why the keen edge of her desire had gone from her.

In that fortnight Alice had shut down her mind for ever upon the past. Apart from the shock of it, her husband's death had given her little to think about that she had not thought already during that summer of revelations. She had made her last review of the past and its blunders. It was to the future she now turned.

And in that turning she was aided and abetted by Asia with an energy and disinterestedness that amazed and delighted her. The day after the funeral Asia had descended upon her mother with an avalanche of common sense and frankness that crumpled up most of Alice's remaining reserves. When she saw her come into her room after breakfast and close the door behind her she knew she was in for it. But these interviews had been shorn of most of their terrors. Alice merely raised herself on her pillows, and then looked expectantly at Asia, who sat down facing her on the bed.

Asia, who had put her own affairs into the background, was now obsessed by her mother's future prospects, and she was not afraid to show how she felt about it. Alice was to learn with much surprise in the days that followed that the years and her absences had made no difference to the girl's realization of her mother's life, that the apparent difference was due to wider comprehension, to a knowledge that even mothers have to work out their own salvation for themselves, and to the fact that the older one grows the more one sees the two sides to every question.

Asia tried not to be flippant or over-decisive, and to remember that the flowers had not yet faded on Roland's grave. But she could not keep her joy out of her eyes as she looked back at her mother's face against the pillow. She did hope that her mother had not got beyond realizing what the future might mean. She did hope she could begin again with some of the glow of youth in her heart.

“Mother,” she began, “I hope that now at last you are going to be happy. Don't pretend you don't know what I mean. I know you can't announce your plans to the world, but you can at least tell me when you mean to marry Uncle David. I want to be at your wedding.”

And having it thrown at her like that, Alice had blushed like a girl, and had turned her face away.

“Really, Asia, it is too soon——” she stammered.

“Oh, don't be conventional with me, Mother, please. I can't be quiet about it. I can't pretend to be mourning. You know your husband was nothing to me, though I appreciated his good points. We both did all we could for him while he was alive. Now we can leave him. And you don't have to wait a year to marry Uncle David, or any of that rot. Three months at the outside—”

“Oh, Asia,” gasped her mother with a touch of impatience, “do let us arrange that for ourselves.”

Then Asia had the good sense to see, even while it hurt her vanity, that this was really her mother's affair, and that she ought to be left to plan for herself.

But that started them, and now that the future had got into their blood they found it difficult to keep up before Betty and Mabel that air of soberness that they decided should be preserved before them for a week or two at least. In the days that Bruce came to dinner before he went to Auckland they tried to do the things that the bay expected them to do. They went round the little homes trying to make everybody feel that their world would not be wrecked. They listened humbly to eulogies of Roland that even he could hardly have heard without a blush. And then when the girls and the children had gone back to school, and they had seen Bruce off to Auckland for a week of preliminary arrangements about the will and the boss's estate, they began in good earnest to plan what they would do with their money.

it had been a fancy of Alice's, after they had decided that they would move to Auckland to live, that they should leave the bay in the spring, on the anniversary of the day they came down the river in the black punt. Even Asia said it was a nice idea, and Bruce, who was determined that Alice should now have a few of her whims gratified, said it should be arranged that way if it meant chartering the Ethel specially for the occasion.

And it did mean that in the end, for the anniversary did not fall on a regular steamer day. The imaginations of the captain and the crew were fired by the magnitude of this enterprise. It was the first time the little steamer had ever been hired for a private undertaking. They cleaned her up for the occasion, and flew the New Zealand flag, which they displayed only for such events as the King's birthday, Empire Day, the owner's birthday, Labour Day, and the anniversary day of the Auckland Province. And for long afterwards they dated various happenings as so many days or weeks before or after “the week we took Mrs. Roland and the family from the bay. Special trip, Mister. Nobody else on board. Cost 'em thirty pounds.”

Almost the entire female population of the bay and a few of the men gathered about the private landing at the side of the tramway and the booms to see them off. The Ethel was to get away about nine o'clock, on the top of a high tide which allowed her to get up to the launch wharf over the mud flat.

The morning was fresh and clear, with a winter tang still in the air, and the river rippled to a light western breeze charged with ocean ozone. The zinc roofs of the cottages glinted in the sun. The shallow waters of the bay sparked in patches where they were torn by the hurried movements of shoals of little fish fleeing from some enemy, real or feared. The white line of the sandspit glowed from the narrow channel by the mill side to the foundations of the store. All round the horizon, the hills, high and low, cut sharp into the rain-washed sky, not yet warmed up by the sun. Pukekaroro and the bush walls behind the mill were brilliant with spring colour, clumps of rata red and kowhai gold and new fern greens. But nowhere now was there silence, and rarely could one hear the song of a solitary bird calling for its mate. Not a tui had been heard about the bay for years, and even the enterprising wekas had been driven further into the forests.

Everywhere that morning the daily business of the place was going on as usual, with its accompanying agglomerate of sounds; for, however much the women of the bay were interested in the departure of the late boss's family, David Bruce had not seen that it was an occasion for sentimental interest on the part of the men. Only those who could, like the old head carpenter, conveniently leave jobs on the spit or about the store, and Bob Hargraves, now promoted to be local manager, were there for last words or final instructions.

While the last of their baggage was being put aboard, Alice sat in a chair on the Ethel's deck with a favoured few gathered about her. In her arms she held a huge bunch of spring flowers that Harold Brayton, with nice feeling, had gathered in the now neglected old garden in the pines. His quiet presentation of them had brought to Alice's eyes the first of the many tears she was to shed that day. Hovering over her, divided between tears and jokes meant to sustain her own and everybody else's courage, was Mrs. King, white haired and fatter than ever, and sure of her supreme right to claim most of the last moments of the whole family. In contrast to her, her daughter Eliza stood silently by, still in deep mourning for her drowned lover, but trying to smile at her mother's sallies. Mrs. King had a powerful rival in the person of Mrs. Bob Hargraves, who had been trying vainly for a week to hide her immense pride in her husband's promotion, and in the fact that he was now to have the house on the cliffs as a residence, with a good deal of the old furniture and fittings intact. She now stood on the other side of Alice with an air of owning the whole family almost as pronounced as Mrs. King's. On the fringe of this familiarity, with a somewhat precarious hold upon it, stood Mrs. Bob Jones, who was uncomfortably aware that the boss's wife had never liked her, although Alice had always courteously acknowledged her position as the wife of one of her husband's most important and trusted heads, the second, indeed, only to David Bruce. Mrs. Bob Jones felt in her secret soul that her husband should have had the boss's house for residence, and she also felt in her secret soul that he would have had it but for the unfortunate fact that Roland had on and off throughout the years paid her certain attentions in her husband's absence, until his final complete absorption by Mrs. Lyman. She had seen sadly in the last weeks that her chickens were coming home to roost, and she wondered how much of what she had called mere flirtations with the boss had got to Alice's ears and how.

On another part of the deck Betty and Mabel held court with some of their elder pupils, and with those few of the better class younger country folk, who as old school-fellows had some claims upon their friendship. The two girls, who had resigned their positions as teachers to follow their mother's desire that they should get degrees at the Auckland university, were wildly excited at the prospects of life in the city, which they knew only from short and tantalizing visits.

To a little group of boys Bunty outlined with flourishes reminiscent of his father the impression he intended to make upon the town school that would be favoured by his attendance. Listening to him, but not with that amount of ad-mirationadmiration he would have liked, stood Elsie, shyly holding the hand of Lily Hargraves, her favourite playmate.

Asia alone had no particular group to smile upon, but went from one to another on the wharf, shaking hands, promising not to forget them, and telling them that she would write, because it was kinder to lie than to tell the truth. The bay knew that she was the person it was really saying good-bye to, for she had told all frankly that she was going to Australia to live, and that she might never see the place again. Bruce had not packed up, or said a word about going except in the ordinary course of business, and Alice had said that she would often return, so that the farewell emotions really centred on Asia, who saw that she had meant to the place more than she ever imagined.

There was more than grief and a sense of coming loss mixed in the emotions of that farewell. Nobody had told the bay that Alice and Bruce were to be married soon after they got to Auckland, but everybody felt in their bones that something of the kind was to happen, and their whispered speculations and their anticipations added a pleasant excitement to their other feelings, and caused them to look for signs. But in this respect they were doomed to disappointment, for Bruce talked on the wharf to Bob Hargraves till the captain called out “All ashore” as the last box went aboard. Then in the scramble of final hand-shakes and good-byes, the excitement of seeing the gangway drawn and the ropes thrown off, they forgot to see if Bruce looked at Alice or if she looked at him, for they were trying as people do at a circus to see every way at once, and to catch the eyes of all the family in turn for that last look and smile of recognition that seemed at the moment to be so important.

Alice stood, unashamed of the tears in her eyes, looking back at the faces blurred before her, and hoping that she had really been something more than a pleasant picture for them to talk of after she was gone. If she could have seen into their hearts and realized how much they really did reverence her as a pure, wronged and gracious lady, even though their estimation of her meant an unconscious criticism of her dead husband, she might have felt, as Asia did, that it was pathetic they could feel so about a person they did not know.

The family group stayed still while the Ethel moved out into the channel. Betty and Mabel and the children continued to wave to their friends on the wharf till they were opposite the mill. Then there was a diversion. The mill siren blew three long blasts as a salute, and the mill flag was run up and dipped in their honour, while the men gathered on the wharves cheered loudly as they passed by.

Swelling with pride at the greatness of the hour, the captain of the Ethel answered with such steam power as his machinery could muster, and there ensued a duet of laughably uneven quality till they had passed the mill grounds.

“We came in fear and trembling; in glory we depart,” murmured Bruce, as if he were quoting something, as he turned his amused but sympathetic eyes upon Alice.

“Oh, David, don't make fun of it. I'm sure they mean it,” she said, wiping her eyes.

“Of course they do,” he answered.

He had looked on at the whole morning scene, seeing with amusement the rivalries that had crept into the leavetaking, the local jealousies, the obtrusion of claims upon his and Alice's favour, all the ebb and flow of ordinary human feeling and motive into any situation, humorous or tragic. But outwardly he had shown no favours, but had given as usual the impression that he was the same to every one, that supreme achievement of diplomacy among average people in a small place.

When the Ethel reached the main channel out in midstream, and the faces on the wharves were no longer to be distinguished, the family group dissolved. Bunty and Elsie went off to explore the steamer in the care of the first mate, and Betty and Mabel found seats that suited them where they might flirt unseen with the second mate, who was a fresh good-looking boy they had met before.

Alice, Asia and Bruce continued to stand near the stern, looking up the river. They had forgotten the people, and were thinking of the place. They looked at the mountain cleaving the sky like a giant wedge of earth driven into the heavens, at the gap through which Tom Roland had brought his dreams of wealth and glory to fruition, at his self-made monument, the mill, roaring and screaming its efficient way through the crystal morning, at the long streamers of smoke drifting away from it on the breeze, at the cottages clustered by the water, and at the house above the white line of cliffs, now half buried by shrubs and trees.

“I never thought I should feel like this about coming away,” began Alice.

“We are not leaving it,” he smiled. “We never really leave anything behind.”

“No,” she admitted humbly. “I am bringing away all it has taught me. Why are you smiling, Asia?” she added, catching a gleam flitting across the blue eyes. “I suppose you want to tell me not to be sentimental.”

“Wrong, Mother. I was thinking of the secrets locked up there in that little place, the whole of life in a nutshell,” nodding her head back at the bay in general. “I guess you are the only person who knows them all, Uncle David.”

“Probably,” he smiled.

“Let them die,” said Alice quietly, looking out over the low swampy southern bank at the Brayton pines that were now coming into view behind the green hill.

She thought of some that Asia did not know, and Asia thought of some that her mother did not know, and Bruce thought of some that neither of them knew.

Thinking of one in particular, Asia moved away from them to a place where she was out of sight for the moment. She wanted to look her last upon the place in the bush above the point they were now passing where the two men had lived that summer. She thought of the story the little cottage hid, and of the tale it would never tell. Her eyes softened as she looked up into the fresh spring greens, and at the dark rocks reaching out unevenly into the tide below. She felt passionately that her summer story had been a great thing to her, and she could only hope that it was a story that would never be spoiled. She had learned, perhaps too soon, that lives are not finished performances, or any series of rounded-off experiences, but a flow of endings dovetailing into fresh beginnings, of abortive experiments, of searches, of reachings out after alluring signs, of retreats, hurts and disillusionments, the whole apparently bound by a cohesive thread, sometimes lost sight of, a thread that seems to lead somewhere, but about which no wise man will dogmatize.

She stayed alone till they reached the gap. Then she looked for her mother and Bruce, who were still where she had left them, looking back up the river.

“I wish,” Alice was saying, “that I had a picture of the old black punt. I always meant to have some one take one before it broke up.”

“For a family crest?” inquired David Bruce, amused at her sentimentality.

“What more appropriate thing can you suggest?” she demanded, her grey eyes lighting up.

His story-telling eyes alone answered her.

And then they turned with Asia to see the last of the bay. They did not speak as bit by bit the gap cut off the familiar features of the place. The mill side of the river went first; then the bay, their old home and the mountain; then the green hill, the Kaiwaka heights behind it, with the spot where Tom Roland lay buried; and last, the black pines of the Brayton farm.

But they knew, even when the gap had cut it all out of sight, that they had not left the river and the hills behind them.

Asia felt that she would carry the freedom of them with her to Australia, into her work with Allen Ross for the intellectual dynamiting of the unthinking masses.

Alice told herself that she would carry the inspiration of them with her into the refuge she planned for the remaking of broken lives.

David Bruce had a fancy as he stood there that he would like to come back to them to die, if only he might be buried as lost diggers were by the sweet fern on some hillside under the open wind-swept sky. But even as he pictured to himself that free and pleasant ending for his bones, he suspected that Alice would see to it, if he died first, that every horrible trapping that civilization has devised for the disposal of a defenceless corpse would be heaped upon his in the name of reverence and respect.

And smiling at his fancy, he drew Alice with him towards the captain, who was beginning to think it was time somebody recognized the importance of his part in the events of the day.