Well, what of it? She thought of what was happening in Gallipoli and France.
She had run through many shades of feeling as she walked. She had shed tears and stumbled, and had used her handkerchief frequently. She had stopped and looked up at the stars, and had stood still and stared at the ground. She had walked twice into the stream of light from a lamp in the study. Two hours of it, and worn out and ready to go on again, she went inside.
II
Dane had not gone to Dargaville as she supposed. Unable to sleep the night before he had gone out on the river and had wandered up and down creeks till at last he had fallen into a doze on the floor of the Diana. The sun was well up when he waked but he did not go home. He went to Te Koperu for some coffee, had some sandwiches made up, and drifted along up the shady bank of the Wairoa trying to screw himself up to the action he had known for some time to be inevitable.
He had been far more abstemious in the last months than Valerie had any idea of. He was suffering from abstemiousness. For weeks the only stimulant he had taken was coffee. He knew well enough as he drifted about in the launch that he had been listless and aloof from Valerie. For days now he had been wondering most of the time just how much of a mask she was wearing, whether she had come to the time when she would be happier away from him than with him. He had been puzzling about it. How was he to find out how much she wanted to go, how far she was disguising her feeling for his sake? He could only do it by getting her off her guard somehow. But she was never off her guard.
