and had given her an idea for another in the same tone. It was this she had been working on this day. So she missed him all the more.
But she sat down determined to eat, and to shut off disturbing thoughts. However, something about the situation hurt her. Once before that autumn he had been away from her for a couple of days. She had not known then, any more than she did now, whether he was at home or at Mac’s. She had taken the information as Lee had given it to her, and without asking any question, had waited for Dane to reappear. But she had found that her love was being denied something it desired, that if he were ill she wanted to take care of him, and yet she did not want to see him ill. She would have shrunk from him unshaved, been shocked by any demoralization of his looks, that was one of the penalties of her passion for his beauty, but at the same time she could not bear to think that she was not equal to that test.
And she knew, also, that he detested being fussed over. When she had spoken that autumn of his loss of appetite he had irritably begged her to ignore it as nothing unusual. Like all sensitive people he hated to think he was under any kind of inspection, and hating it as much as he did, she had been very careful not to make the same kind of observation again. She was more than ever determined to help him by being happy in herself.
And so she ate a good lunch, and then changed her clothes and went out to prepare a bed for winter bulbs. She had renewed a childhood passion that year, and all the past summer and autumn there had been gorgeous patches of colour in the sunshiny spaces of the garden. After two hours she put away her tools, and sat on the front verandah to smoke a cigarette and to relax. She did hope Lee would come to tell her that Dane wanted her
