Valerie walked on as Bob had directed her till she came to a low, narrow building standing between two open lots. The paper had been housed in a store on the fringe of the town near the railway station. There she saw trucks of sawn timber which was being loaded into a brig at the short wharf. Train sheds blackened by smoke straggled along both sides of the line in the direction of the ticket office which was a couple of blocks inland. She crossed the street with her eyes on the unpretentious construction that was to house more than she ever dreamed. A newly painted sign, The Dargaville News, dwarfed its size and diminished the proportions of the one broad window, which had been whitewashed inside half-way up. She knew it was probably the smallest and meanest newspaper office in the colony, but she had learned not to despise beginnings.
As she stood a moment considering it she could hear Bob’s voice inside giving orders to somebody, and the monotonous throb of machinery in the rear. Feeling as if she had cast something behind her forever, she put her foot on the log step and jumped into a narrow passage partitioned from the office for a distance of six feet by glazed glass. Past it she looked across a high sloping counter down at Bob. He was leaning over a desk by the opposite wall, and while he wrote he was telling a dark boy of extraordinary aliveness to get a certain advertisement back from the foreman. Valerie whistled the notes of the tui’s spring song. Bob spun round on his chair and got to his feet. The dark boy, after one unabashed stare at her, darted into the composing-room to tell the staff that she had come.
“I’m ready for anything,” she said.
“I never knew you when you weren’t,” grinned Bob.
