respect those two awful old women who never saw the sun and never knew when it was spring. Oh dear! I’m talking too much. You must stop being such a good listener.”
“Must I?” His eyes held hers for a minute. Then he stood up. And they went on to the gully.
She sat down on his narrow cot sniffing the smell of the canvas and the snug air of the tent. She took in the details of its spartan simplicity in a glance or two—the box cupboards, the plain kauri table, the rickety camp chairs, the few cooking utensils, the Chinese matting pressed over the uneven ground, the small typewriter, piles of books and papers, and socks and ties and clothes overloading a standard pole. Nothing less like the abode of a sybarite could be imagined. And he seemed strangely out of place in it as he moved about like an aristocratic cat, but feminine and feline only in his grace. She felt again there was nothing in his quality to suggest diluted masculinity.
“Will you have tea or wine?” he asked.
“Well, I would like tea.”
“Good. Come on and carry some of these things out to the fireplace.” He handed her various utensils, and then he filled a billy from a covered bucket.
Valerie’s spirits rose with every minute. It is doubtful if there is a more friendly thing on earth than a picnic fire built to boil a billy for tea, and when it is tea for two it gathers a mysterious glamour as a human mob accumulates intensity.
And there never were two people more susceptible to any kind of enchantment than Valerie and Dane. They stood watching the smoke curl up into vanishing wisps among the tree tops and the shadows deepen about them. As he puffed contentedly at his pipe he reflected that a
