by the time Mrs. Benton and Bob appeared with the baskets. Both Roger and his wife forgave her for the afternoon before the picnic meal was over. No parents could long have been annoyed with a girl who was so obviously delighted with their children. They both noticed that she paid very little attention to Bob.
As they walked back to the gully in the twilight Valerie’s mood changed again. She kept looking at the colours fading out of the sky, and when they turned in off the beach she glanced enviously at the tent snuggled there and now lit from within by the light of a lamp. She wanted to go and peep through the flap, wanted desperately to see the man who was wise enough to be alone there. But it was a stupid world. She could not follow all her impulses.
Roger Benton returned to Dargaville with her and Bob. While the two men talked business Valerie mooned along thinking her own thoughts. They left her at River Street to go to the office. She was in no mood to go inside. She wandered along the flat uninteresting road in the direction of Aratapu. She was not in the least ashamed of her rudeness of the afternoon. If she had been nice, she reflected, invitations to dinner would have been the result. In the end these people would have learned that she did not want to have anything to do with them. She cared nothing for the fact that the men she had met were her bosses on the paper. What they paid her for was her work, and she would show them she could do that. And she chuckled to think that because her father had lent them money they would have to take her as they found her.
And then there slipped into her mind the picture of the tent lit from within, and snuggled against the cliffs. She wondered if Dane Barrington ever came to the hotel.
