age and fatigue. Sometimes a swift, transitory gust of rain flew over the ship, but soon relapsed into the indefinite saline mist that seemed to pervade both earth and sky. A few scattered white houses with wet iron roofs, a white lighthouse on the north side of the harbour, and the mute sunburnt forest rising tier above tier till it rolled away into the horizon—these were all the visible attractions of St. Paul’s, W.A. Sometimes a quick glance of sunshine alighted on the bushy hills far inland, and showed out their ashy-white network of dead trees, or flashed on the flying splinters of rain close at hand; but there was something pallid and cheerless even in that momentary brightness.
“It’s very Australian,” said Lady May Carr, who was the leading lady of this voyage, to her companion, a tall young Englishman with a grave, handsome face. Lady May was tall, too, and fair and robust. She was a very good imitation of a pretty woman, but her eyes and eyelashes, hair and complexion, were all exactly the same tint—a sort of whitey-brown sugar-paper shade. Nevertheless, she possessed in perfection the well-born, well-trained, well-preserved appearance of the superior travelling English-woman. Everything she had on was evidently the right thing; if anything, it was too right.
