lists with your Prince, Elsie dear. I can wait. He won't come along. Princes like that don't ride through the gum-trees."
"Now," she said seriously, "it pleases me to hear you talk like that. It makes me feel that you are strong. I wish that you were strong enough to carry me off and put an end to my doubts for ever."
"Shall I try?"
"No, no. Give me my year. Frank, I do not want to care for you. I am grateful to you for loving me. You'll believe that."
Elsie slept badly that night. They had danced till long past midnight, and she had tried to drown her guilty recollection of poor Jensen. She had danced again with Blake, and they had talked in the verandah afterwards, not of personal topics. With a tact which she appreciated he avoided allusion to their previous conversation—but of travel, of men and women and books, of life on the Luya, and of the wider life beyond. And she had danced with Trant, and he had been very personal, and had expressed his admiration with a certain respectful bluntness which had amused her, and had done more than anything else to distract her thoughts from more painful subjects. She told herself that if he was a little rough he meant no harm; and that his roughness was of a more interesting kind than that of the Luya squatters in general. Elsie was not very fond of bushmen. She preferred the Bank-clerks and young Civil-servants of Leichardt's Town.
She had danced, too, more than once again with Hallett and she was doing her very best to persuade herself that the regard she felt for Frank Hallett was the nearest approach she should ever get to love. And then she had seen very plainly that Lady Garfit and her daughter were making up to the Halletts, and that Frank was clearly an object of desire in matrimonial circles. It was perfectly evident that Rose Garfit was in love with him. Rose was another type of Leichardt's Town. She was not soft and slender and complex, like Elsie, but was a great Junoesque creature, with
