to Dane almost resentfully. “I hope you’re proud of the surrender.”
“If I thought it was that I should commence divorce proceedings to-morrow,” he retorted. “I could live with anything but a surrender.”
David Bruce stood by his window to watch them go along to the Diana. He felt he would like to know how they got on.
“How many years do you give those two?” asked Bob, with a grin on his face.
“Bob, I don’t think time will matter very much in this case. They care more about the quality of life than the length of it—those two.”
There followed wonderful days and wonderful nights for the lovers. For a week the weather was hot and fine, and they began the day with a plunge right out of bed into their little bay. Then after their housekeeping was done he retired into the cooler tent to write, and Valerie either read or walked about the hills or went off rowing to limber up her limbs, stiffened by long months of sitting. If she returned before he was out calling for her she kept very still. After their lunch they played in the bay or dozed in hammocks in the gully till it was time for tea, and then, as the day became cooler and they felt energetic, they would get ready for a night picnic, an excursion up the river, or a long walk over the slopes to the harbour.
At first Dane had insisted on doing most of the work, and she had been convulsed the first time she saw him clean the frying-pan. She tried to see him back in his own setting at the old station, where, except for the care of the Diana, he never did a stroke of work. She watched him here doing the washing up, shaking the matting on the ground floor, airing the bedding, as he did in the first days while she was so tired, as if it were some other man
