to have tea with him. But no, he brought a fully equipped tray for one out to her.
As it depressed her to take it alone she did the most sensible thing she could afterwards. She got up her horse and went off riding in the direction of Te Koperu, turning up a track on the ranges to get a fine view. There was a fresh, cool wind that stimulated her, and she was sufficiently philosophical when she reached home to face the rest of the day with her own company. She played to herself all the evening. She was now working through the piano scores of the Beethoven symphonies, so that she would the more enjoy them when she came to hear them played by the great orchestras of the world. They were an endless source of delight to her, and this night she lost herself in the art she loved, and forgot all about Dane until Lee brought in the supper tray.
II
Dane had waked late that morning from an intermittent dozing to find himself in a wretched state of nerves. He had been sleeping badly for a week or two, and had fought every night the temptation to take morphia. He wondered why some men were born to sleep so well and others so ill. He had seen bushmen sound asleep on the tops of logs that were being drawn along tramways by patient, reliable horses that needed no guidance, he had seen men asleep on wagon loads of hay, men asleep about the decks of timber ships, men asleep in the fields, men asleep on timber stacks in the dinner hour at the mills, men asleep on chairs and on benches in the pubs. And it seemed to him as if he were the only person he knew to whom the dark goddess denied that elementary right of man.
He wondered sometimes if his erratic, ill-regulated
