the sake of its own beauty, but because it was within easy reach of the one man he could trust to perform the ceremony and keep it quiet.
“Are you sure of him?” Valerie had asked doubtfully.
“I would trust David Bruce with anything, even as a private person. And as a Justice of the Peace he is like a lawyer or a priest. They call him Strong Box up there because they say he knows some strange secrets, and because nothing you ever put into him comes out till you take it out yourself.”
And Valerie was very glad long before December was over that she could leave all the details to Dane and simply be prepared like a child to be surprised and delighted with each day as it came along.
When Dane had gone some three miles up the Otamatea River, between the bare and wind-swept wastes about the harbour, he turned the nose of the Diana round a grass-covered headland on his right and let her run on her momentum into a little bay, a perfect arch of white sand, that sloped gently into clear water above a hard sandy bottom, a shore as different as it could be from the steep, soft banks of the muddy Wairoa. On a flat that curved with the bay’s sweep were the remains of an old house, long since tumbled into a heap of ruins, and lichen-spotted and overgrown with convolvulus, honeysuckle and degenerated grape-vines. About it, planted as three sides of a square, the open ends reaching to within a yard or two of the beach, were the double lines of poplars which the early settlers in these parts seem to have regarded as some kind of talisman, for they planted them so frequently. Within this square and all about the ruins there flourished an old garden open to the sun and wind. Dane had picked moss roses there the summer before, and had lain down to sleep with the fragrance of sweet briar in his nostrils.
