Page:The Toll of the Bush.pdf/88

The Mallow who occupied the old homestead was a son of the founder of the family. He had married a half-caste woman, and had numerous olive branches with corresponding complexions. The sons had mostly disappeared—two were in South Africa, fighting the Boers. The daughters disappeared too, but more gradually. Now and then it became necessary to send one away to a distant relative, preferably in Auckland; and now and then one died of consumption. For many of the half-caste girls this was the dread alternative to marriage. As they left off their childhood the girls came to the window, where they could see the young men ride by, sitting loosely in their saddles, their hard bright eyes sweeping the beach. Sometimes at intervals of months, even years, the young men looked at the window. Then followed a season of danger and delight. The river was a sheet of silver in the moonbeams; the warm night wind breathed along the sands; the threatening of the bar was no more than a bee’s drone. And there were dances occasionally here, and in the county township up the river, and at the settlers’ houses; and though there might be a ride or a pull of twenty or thirty miles to the place of entertainment, the attendance suffered little from that. But the young men went back to their work in the bush, felling and driving and forgetting, and sometimes the girls wished that they had never been born.

The coming of the Reverend Mr. Fletcher was a golden event in the lives of the two remaining Mallow girls, and they were naturally his earliest converts. Winnie was twenty-four and Mabel twenty-one. They were fine buxom creatures, with