Wild, Wild Heart/Chapter 3

A week later Ann really did see the sunrise.

Since her adventure with Mrs. Holmes in that mysterious hour before the dawn, the girl had often wakened from sleep, startled at some unusual sound, wondering if the poor somnambulist was again restless. But each occasion proved a false alarm. Then came a night when, roused from a deep sleep, she felt convinced she was not mistaken. A stealthy footstep had sounded in the hall! It could not be either Mrs. Pratt or Emily, for they did not come up from the cottage to the homestead before six in the morning. She listened breathlessly. Undoubtedly some one was moving about now in the kitchen. Suppose Mrs. Holmes in one of her nocturnal rambles set the wooden house on fire!

Ann thrust her feet into her slippers, and hurriedly threw on a wrapper. Making her way along the passage, she saw a light under the kitchen door. Well! At any rate she wouldn’t this time have the uncanny experience of meeting Mrs. Holmes in the dark. That was a comfort. She opened the door gently, and saw the lamp lighted, a fire burning in the stove, steam coming from the kettle, and a man bending over a ​saucepan in which eggs were being cooked—and this at an hour or two after midnight!

A strange proceeding! The meal could scarcely be supper, seeing that the entire family had retired to rest shortly before ten o’clock. And breakfast, soon after midnight, would surely entail very little fast to break! The man at the stove was clad in an old coat and riding trousers; and when he turned she saw, to her still further astonishment, that he was Rodney Marsh!

“What has happened?” she whispered. “Is any one ill?”

He turned to look at her in some surprise. She had closed the door behind her in case she should disturb the sleeping house.

“What are you doing—up at this time in the morning?” he asked in his turn.

“I wondered who was here.”

“I’m just getting some breakfast for the boss.”

“Why? Is he going away?”

“Going away! Of course not. We’re only starting to muster.”

“In the middle of the night?”

He was quite coolly setting things on the table.

“Don’t you know that sheep have to be mustered before dawn? After sunrise they scatter. It makes the work twice as hard. At night they’re all pretty well together on the higher country.”

Through the door behind her, Dick Holmes entered. He looked rather more astonished than she had done, but it was at her appearance here at this hour, not the shepherd’s.

“Miss Merrill thought I was a burglar,” said Rodney, grinning.

​“We’re mustering this morning. Shearing begins tomorrow,” explained Holmes.

“I’m sorry,” returned Ann, a trifle abashed.

“Not at all, the pleasure’s ours. Don’t run away. Rodney always wakes me and sees that I get breakfast before we start, Don’t go. Have a cup of tea.”

“There you are,” said Marsh, setting a cup on the table in front of her. “Bread and butter?”

Ann did not stop to think that well-conducted governesses do not as a rule sit down in their dressing-gowns at 1.30 A.M. to take tea in the kitchen with the master of the house and the head-shepherd. She sat down.

“I feel as if this were an air-raid tea party,” she said.

“You don’t remember them, do you?”

“Rather. I was ten when the war started.”

“I was nearly smashed up by the bomb that dropped at Swan and Edgar’s corner. I was home on leave from France. I had the wind up all right that night.”

“I remember seeing the barricades there next day,” said Ann.

She and Holmes continued to discuss the war. Rodney Marsh was out of this, but at last Holmes turned to him:

“Marsh has a grievance. He was born too late. Only sixteen when the war ended, poor chap. If he’d only been a few years older he might have been flourishing a wooden leg by now, or still coughing up poison gas, or enjoying a bit of lead in his lung, by way of a treat. It’s a darn shame the way some people have all the fun, isn’t it, Rod?”

“Oh, well! I wish I’d seen it, all the same,” grumbled Marsh.

​“Do you? Well, I suppose that’s what we all wished—before we saw it!”

Holmes dismissed the subject, and he and Rodney talked of other matters. The shearing—of Waring having already “cut out” at Kopu. Ann, sipping her hot tea, and nibbling her bread and butter, was thoroughly enjoying herself. But at last Holmes rose.

“I think we’d better push off.”

They were gone. And as Ann dressed and went out to see the sunrise, she felt that she knew and liked both men better since that very unconventional breakfast in the dawn.

Shearing had begun. Sitting in the school-room on the hill, one could hear from across the paddocks the beat of the engine at the woolshed, the barking of dogs, and the bleating of sheep. Men moving about in the hot sunshine amongst the dusty yards were whistling and shouting at their dogs. A thin column of smoke rose up from the camp fire near the tent of the Maori shearers. The engine stopped. That meant ten o’clock, and smoke-o for all hands. They had started at five, with an hour off for breakfast.

The little girls were restless—longing to be off across the paddocks to the shed.

“Not until eleven,” said Ann. “Then no more lessons.”

“You’re coming down too?”

“Of course I am—I’ve never seen shearing. You’ll have to show me everything.”

“Rodney and Dad have just brought in a mob of sheep. They’ll be there too.”

​The flies buzzed round them under the hot iron roof; out in the garden locusts rasped; but the interminable hour passed at last, and then hats were put on, and away they all sped across the paddocks to the shed. The engine was beating steadily, running the machines within the shed, where the sweating shearers passed comb and cutter over the prostrate sheep, bringing off the gray matted fleece in one thick piece. Holmes and Rodney were in the yards, drafting the ewes and lambs through the race—the swinging gate, shutting mothers into one yard, children into another. What an alarmed protest of bleating and baa-ing filled the air! The men shouting to hurry them on, the dogs barking, and the Maori boys—the sheep-os—laughing and chattering as they filled up the pens inside the shed ready for the shearers.

“Come along to give us a hand?” shouted Holmes to Ann.

She nodded, smiling at him, and leaned against the outer post and rail fence of the yards. He came across to her.

“Like to have a look at the shed first?”

“I’d love to.”

He glanced a trifle doubtfully at her fresh linen frock.

“You’ll probably get a bit dirty in there. What about your dress?”

“It’ll wash,” she answered cheerfully.

“Come on, then. Come on, young ’uns.”

He led the way in at the back of the shed. Along the length of the building the shearers were ranged, each man at his machine; they were all Maoris, clad in old belted trousers, with a wisp of singlet, or ​striped football jersey, on the upper part of their sweating brown bodies.

As each sheep was shorn the shearer stepped across “the board,” pushed open the door of the pen—kept full by the sheep-os—and hauling out another animal from within, threw the clumsily matted beast on its back. Then the comb and cutter, guided by an expert hand, moved swiftly under the wool; and within an extraordinarily short space of time the whole fleece lay on the greasy floor, and a slim, creamily shining creature—bewildered at the sudden and drastic beauty treatment—was on its four legs once more, being hustled through the trap-door out into the counting pen in the yards beyond.

The fleece-os—two grinning Maori girls in colored cotton dresses—were kept busy gathering up the dirty fleeces and throwing them on the classing table; while the shed hands—two more girls with brooms—were hard at work sweeping “the board” clear of dirty matted ends of wool which were not to go into the press.

A fat smiling Maori woman stood at the classing table. She felt the staple of each fleece, and then threw them one by one into different bins, according to grade and quality. Two men at the iron-framed wool press took the fleeces from the bins, and rammed them into jute bales which, when tightly pressed, would be sewn up and rolled over to an adjoining shed, to be stenciled with the station mark.

Ann thought the inside of the shed was interesting, but she liked the yards better; and later, when armed with a leafy willow branch she was instructed to keep the sheep moving towards the race, she found she was quite enjoying herself. This was the sort of life she’d ​love, she reflected. So much nicer to be out in the open all day long, with the sun, and the wind, and the blue sky, than to be shut up indoors. Well, perhaps some day she could have a little farm of her own. What would it cost, she wondered? Nearly £400—the balance of the money her mother had left her—was safely lodged in the savings bank in Wairiri. But that wouldn’t go far in buying a farm, she feared. She was to get another £200 when she was twenty-five, and if she saved… No! It didn’t sound practicable. Still, most dreams weren’t easily realized.

“You’ll be growing into a regular farmer soon,” said a voice beside her.

Rodney Marsh, begrimed and dusty—his soiled shirt open at the neck, his sleeves rolled up above his elbows, and his old felt hat on the back of his head—stood beside her.

“Just what I was thinking I’d like to be,” she answered, flourishing her willow branch, and shouting “Shoo!” at one of the last hesitating sheep.

Marsh laughed.

“Wonderful fine farmer you’d make!” he jeered.

“A better one than you think, perhaps,” she answered briskly.

“What do you know about sheep?”

“Nothing—at present. But I could learn. I’ve learnt not to fall off when I canter, at any rate.”

“That’s a great lot to know, isn’t it?”

“I don’t mind being laughed at. What are all those things in the wool of the sheep?”

The laughter died out of Marsh’s face.

“Bathurst burr,” he answered shortly.

“What the children call ‘biddy-biddy’?”

“Yes.”

​“It makes a difference in the value of the wool, doesn’t it?”

He nodded, a little frown drawing down his brows above troubled eyes.

“Fleeces are light, too. The dry winter and spring meant very little feed for the stock.”

“Will it be a bad shearing?”

“Just about as bad as it can be. A record bad clip, I should say.”

“Poor Mr. Holmes. How worried he must be.”

“Well, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth. But things haven’t been too easy for him lately, I’m thinking.”

He pulled himself up suddenly, and shot a little, half-resentful glance at the girl beside him, as though by some obscure mind process he blamed her for his lapse into this semi-confidential discussion of “the boss.”

“All sheep-farmers have bad years and good years,” he went on. “You’ve got to expect a poor clip sometimes.”

Hicky—the big half-caste in charge of the shearing gang—appeared at the back of the shed, and hailed Marsh.

“Come here a minute, Rod.”

There was an easy assurance, almost insolence of command in the tone, and Ann knew that the young shepherd beside her stiffened.

“What is it?” he asked coolly.

“The boss wants you.”

“That’s all right, Hicky,” said Holmes, who now appeared beside the half-caste in the doorway. Hicky, dismissed, went back into the shed, and Holmes, ​followed by the two little girls, made his way out into the yards.

Ann drove the last sheep into the race as Marsh moved forward to meet “the boss”; and then while the two men talked together, the children joined Ann in the shade of the willows outside the post and rail fence.

After a moment the engine stopped. It was twelve o’clock, the shearers’ dinner time! Across the paddocks Biddy and Jo raced back to the homestead, and Ann followed more slowly with Holmes. She could see that something had put him out and concluded that the prospect of the poor clip was the cause of his annoyance. But when he spoke she realized that the worry, though more immediate, was less serious.

It appeared that Marsh and the burly half-caste were on bad terms, and the sheep-farmer’s chief preoccupation at the moment was to prevent any open disagreement.

“I wouldn’t have engaged Hicky’s gang if I hadn’t been forced to,” said Holmes. “One doesn’t want trouble at shearing time, and they’re both difficult customers to handle. However if they stick to their own jobs there’s no necessity for them to come up against one another. And Hicky spends most of his evenings at the Omoana ‘pub’.”

“Perhaps that’s the cause of the trouble,” said Ann shrewdly.

Holmes shrugged.

“It may be. A pity Rod has got mixed up with that crowd. He’s too fine a lad for them. However, he’s twenty-five and it’s his own business, not mine. All I ask is that he doesn’t let his private quarrels interfere with my work.”

​During luncheon Ann realized that the likelihood of a bad clip, and the trouble between the head-shepherd and the shearing expert, were not the only difficulties with which Dick Holmes had to contend at the moment. For the past week Vera had been suffering from nerves. She was undoubtedly doing her best to control them, but it seemed as though within her she carried some hidden consuming fire of anger, which at any moment might break forth in violent eruption.

After the meal Holmes went back to the shed, and the little girls clamored to follow him.

“You are not to go,” said Vera.

They were all sitting on the veranda together, Ann trimming a hat for Mrs. Holmes, who smoked fiercely and continuously.

“Why not?” asked Biddy, pouting.

“Because I say so. I won’t have you tearing about down there alone amongst the Maori shearers.”

“Miss Merrill can come too.”

“Miss Merrill is busy.”

“Trimming your old hats! You’re selfish—she wants to go.”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” said Vera sharply. Then after a moment she went on, her voice more under control, “Alice and Connie Ralston are coming over to tea with you.”

“I don’t want them. I hate them. I won’t play with them.”

“You’ll do as you’re told,” again the tone was edged and harsh.

“You can’t make me nice to them if I don’t want to be.”

​“I’ll be nice to them,” said Jo, cheerfully. “I like Alice.”

Mrs. Holmes continued to smoke in silence. Biddy, watching her intently, suddenly said aggressively:

“I am going down to the shed.”

She made a movement as though to carry out her threat, but in a second Mrs. Holmes had sprung from her seat and seized her arm. The child screamed.

“You’re hurting me—let me go. You’re cross and horrid.”

“How dare you talk to me like that?”

The fury in Vera Holmes’s face was not pleasant to see.

“Yes, you are horrid. You don’t love me, and you don’t love Daddy either. It’s only Jo and Gerald you like.”

It was then like a flash that the eruption came. Vera Holmes’s face was convulsed with passion. Stooping she seized a thick hunting crop lying on the veranda and brought it down heavily across the child’s small shoulders. Biddy was screaming now at the top of her lungs.

“Let me go—beast—beast—I hate you.”

But again and again the heavy crop descended. Suddenly Vera flung it from her, and released the shrieking child.

“Go up to the schoolroom—Jo, you go too,” she said hoarsely, and pushing them both down the veranda steps, she sank back into her own chair.

Ann had risen. It had all happened so quickly that she had been powerless to interfere. In any case what could she do? She was appalled by the scene. Biddy had certainly deserved punishment, and probably she had not been so badly hurt, for her clothes had helped ​break the force of the blows; but the child was so small and weak, and Vera Holmes so strong, and the fury in her face so uncontrolled, that Ann felt sickened. Biddy, still sobbing violently, rushed up the garden path towards the schoolroom; Jo followed more slowly, turning her head occasionally to watch, as though fascinated, her mother’s face. On the veranda there was silence. Then the telephone bell rang—three long rings—the signal for Tirau.

“I’ll go,” said Vera.

She was still trembling, and breathing heavily as though she had been running hard, but at the telephone her voice sounded normal once more.

“Yes? Oh… you! Wait a moment.”

She laid down the receiver and stepped back to the veranda.

“Just go up and see that the children are all right in the school-room, will you Miss Merrill?”

Ann needed no second bidding. She flew up the garden path. In one corner of the schoolroom Jo was bending over a heap of misery which was Biddy.

“You can have my red pencil, Bid,” she was saying. “The one with the injun-rubber at the end.”

“I don’t want it.”

She tried to force the red pencil between the fingers of two hands covering a convulsed and swollen face.

“I only chewed the injun-rubber a few times. It rubs out quite all right.”

Ann walked over to the prostrate child and gathered her up in her arms.

“Such a dusty old floor to lie on,” she remarked cheerfully.

Biddy struggled to be free.

​“Go away—I don’t want you,” she sobbed. “I don’t want any one.”

“Don’t be a stupid old Biddikins,” said Ann in as matter-of-fact a tone as she could command. “What’s the sense of lying on the floor there amongst all the dust and microbes?”

“What’s microbes?” asked Jo.

“A microbe is a funny wriggly little creature—it turns, and twirls, and squirms.”

“Biddy’s a microbe!” said Jo delightedly.

“I’m not.” Biddy gave a violent kick in her sister’s direction.

“Of course she isn’t,” said Ann.

In spite of Biddy’s struggles she still held her, and sat down now in the one easy chair the schoolroom possessed.

“I’ll tell you a story about a very funny little microbe that lived in a teeny weeny hole in the floor.”

Biddy’s struggles subsided. She was still sobbing in a sort of hiccupping fashion, her poor little face all blotched and swollen, but she wanted to hear about the microbe. She liked Ann’s stories.

With the child cradled in her arms, and Jo’s fat jolly face upturned to hers, Ann sat and racked her brains to invent humorous and exciting adventures for the microbe. But to tell the truth this was not easy. Her heart was aching for the child she held. No doubt Biddy had been very rude and very disobedient, but she had seemed so pitifully small and helpless in the grip of that infuriated woman. And Ann knew that Vera Holmes was not merely punishing and correcting the child; she was letting loose some flood of passion within her, in those dreadful ​blows. The punishment had been so prodigiously in excess of the crime!

How was one to try and comfort the victim of injustice, without appearing to criticize the chastening hand? Ann didn’t know; but the microbe in a top-hat and Oxford bags and spats, and white kid gloves, continued his extraordinary adventures, until Jo chortled with delight and even Biddy’s tear-stained face twisted into the semblance of a smile. At the end of the story, Jo, looking out of the window, announced that Alice and Connie were riding up to the gate.

“I won’t be nice to them,” said Biddy, still defiant.

“Oh, yes you will,” returned Ann, with more cheerful conviction than she felt. “What about having a microbe tea-party? Come along down to my room, Biddy, and wash your face, and I’ll give you some chocolates to bring back to the schoolroom.”

“What’s a microbe tea-party?” demanded Jo.

Again Ann’s inventiveness was called into play. On the spur of the moment she had to frame rules and regulations, and a complete manual of etiquette, for microbes. Later, approaching the schoolroom to discover how things were going, she realized that there were no hostilities in progress. Harmony reigned, and the party seemed to be in full swing. But it was not going according to the preconceived Merrill code. It had taken a new and original turn. Two chocolate creams were on one plate, and two bits of dry bread on another.

“Will you have Marblar-Marblar or Sarblar-Sarblar?” she heard Biddy asking her guests politely.

“Marblar-Marblar, please,” said Alice.

The bits of dry bread were handed to the Ralstons, ​who obediently ate them while their hostesses devoured the chocolate creams. More chocolates, and more pieces of bread were produced.

“Marblar-Marblar or Sarblar-Sarblar?” asked Jo.

“Sarblar-Sarblar,” returned Connie, her eyes fixed on the chocolates.

Again the dry bread was proffered. Connie looked bewildered.

“I said Sarblar-Sarblar,” she said.

“That’s it.”

“Oh! Is it?”

“Yes.”

Biddy was quite gravely eating the chocolate, but Jo was choking over hers in fits of unholy mirth. For whether the Ralstons chose Marblar-Marblar or Sarblar-Sarblar, they always got dry bread; and being assured that they had got what they asked for, they ate it.

Ann knew that the perfect governess would interrupt the proceedings and insist upon these imperfect hostesses behaving properly; but seeing that the party appeared to be progressing quite amicably, she decided that discretion was the better part of government, and returned unseen to the house.

Ann, having given the little girls their tea, was sitting in her own room endeavoring to finish the hat before dinner, when Vera Holmes entered. The storm of passion earlier in the afternoon had evidently had the effect of relieving the elder woman’s nervous tension. She was once more charming, gracious, and looking very handsome in her vivid evening gown.

​“Satisfactory for her to find this remedy for nerves,” Ann reflected a trifle cynically; but hardly so pleasant for the small child who had provided the outlet. Yet, when Mrs. Holmes sat down beside Ann, praising her skill, and thanking her for what she had done in transforming an old hat into something which looked like a Parisian model, the girl felt once more the spell of her employer’s fascinating personality.

“I’m very sorry I lost my temper with Biddy today,” said Mrs. Holmes. “But Biddy and I both suffer from stormy temperaments. We have these clashes sometimes. I ought to have more self-control, I know. You were shocked, weren’t you?”

“‘Shocked’ has a prudish sound about it. I was… sorry too.”

“For me, or for Biddy?”

Ann considered this for a moment.

“Very sorry for Biddy at first, and more sorry for you afterwards.”

“You thought it a dreadful exhibition?”

Ann didn’t answer, and Mrs. Holmes, who had been sitting in a wicker chair beside the bed, got up and moved to the open window.

“It was a dreadful exhibition,” she said in a low tone, not looking at Ann. “I know that without being told. But I want you to try and forget it. This last week I’ve been nearly off my head with nerves. I haven’t slept, and I feel a wreck. I hope I don’t look one.”

She turned, and Ann was forced to laugh.

“You know quite well that you are looking a picture,” she said.

“That’s what I came in to find out,” admitted Mrs. Holmes. “I’m intolerably vain—but I needn’t inform ​you of that fact. You’re quite a shrewd enough little monkey to have found me out already. If there’s a man within a mile, I always prink and preen, and endeavor to look my best. And Gerald Waring’s here to dinner. He rang up to say he wanted to see Dick about some sheep. Mutton and wool again tonight, I suppose!”

She made a little grimace, then crossed over, and kissing Ann lightly on the cheek, she vanished.

The kiss surprised Ann more than anything else. What was she to do with such a woman?

“Should I ever really dislike her?” she wondered. For she knew that Vera had succeeded in disarming her. Resentment had vanished.

But Mrs. Holmes was not the only woman in the house who wished to look her best at dinner that night. Ann made faces at herself in the glass, and told herself she was a little fool, but nevertheless she donned her most becoming frock.

Well, she might have saved herself the trouble she thought later, with a laugh at her own expense. Beyond a casual “How-do-you-do,” Waring had not addressed one single remark to her. At dinner Dick Holmes suggested a game of bridge; and so, as soon as the children were safely in bed, Ann made her way out on to the front veranda where the others were sitting. But she was thinking more of Biddy now than of Waring—for Biddy had whispered to her as she tucked her up:

“I hate Mummy, but I love you.”

“Well, I certainly don’t love any one who can talk like that,” returned Ann coldly, though perhaps not quite truthfully, for she already felt a great attachment to both these little girls.

​“It doesn’t make any difference what you feel,” said Biddy. “It’s me that feels it. And Mummy’ll hurt you some day if she doesn’t like you. She hurts Daddy, and she hurts me.”

“Now don’t let me hear any more of that nonsense,” said Ann sternly. “I shan’t stay here if you talk like that.”

“Would you go right away?”

“Yes.”

“Back to England?”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, I won’t say it, ’cos I want you to stay.”

“Biddy, it’s only horrible little girls who talk about their mothers like that.”

“All right. I won’t be horrible. Good night.”

Ann left her, feeling rather appalled. She told herself that children often said foolish things of this sort—“hating” people who had displeased them—that the remarks were forgotten almost as soon as they were uttered; but at the same time she experienced a sense of discomfort. She must not encourage Biddy’s affection. It seemed disloyal to Mrs. Holmes. Yet wasn’t that rather hard on the child? What an annoying little complication. Well, never mind! It would probably vanish in a day or two at most.

Twilight had fallen, but it was not yet dark. A constant bleating from ewes and lambs in the paddocks near the shed filled the air. After the shearing separation, mothers and their young were seeking to find one another. They would probably all be identified correctly in a few hours—no ewe would accept the ​wrong lamb! The crickets were busy singing their night song in the garden. But there were other songs being sung down at the shearers’ quarters, where the Maoris, gathered round the camp fire, were entertaining themselves to the accompaniment of a well-played concertina. Very musical voices they had, thought Ann, and wished she might go nearer to hear the concert more distinctly. As if in answer to this wish, Waring suddenly remarked:

“What about strolling down to listen to the Maoris before we start bridge?”

“How energetic you are,” said Vera. “Can’t we hear them plainly enough without moving?”

“Miss Merrill looks as though she wanted to go,” returned Waring.

“I’d love to,” said Ann.

“Dick, you take Miss Merrill down, and we’ll wait for you here.”

“I want a word with Hicky about the lorry for my wool,” said Waring.

“I don’t think you’ll find Hicky there,” remarked Holmes. “He’s usually over at Omoana in the evenings.”

“I’ll leave a message with Parone then.”

Waring got up.

“I suppose you won’t be happy until you’ve succeeded in dislodging us all from our comfortable chairs,” said Vera, rising lazily.

She made her way towards the steps, and Ann followed. Vera turned.

“Aren’t you coming, Dick?” she called, a faint note of irritation in her voice.

“You three go on. I’ll follow later. I promised to say good night to the kids.”

​“You’ll only disturb them—come along.”

Vera’s tone was imperious, but Holmes, used to this note in her voice, calmly went on filling his pipe without moving. Waring had reached the steps leading down from the first terrace. Vera was close behind him, and Ann straggled along rather undecidedly in the rear. Somehow she knew that Mrs. Holmes didn’t want her. But could she turn back now and resume her seat on the veranda beside Mr. Holmes? That would look rather queer and pointed.

“We’re waiting for you, Miss Merrill.”

Waring’s voice resolved her doubt, and she moved forward. The man had opened the big gate at the end of the drive, and Mrs. Holmes had already passed through. As Ann came close beside him, Waring whispered: “I engineered this to get a chance to speak to you alone. I’ll join you later.”

Ann walked on. She had made no reply, and she was furiously annoyed with herself because that urgent whisper had had the effect of quickening the beat of her heart. The impertinence of the man! To ignore her publicly, and then to imagine that she would jump at the chance of this clandestine flirtation! She wouldn’t! She wouldn’t! But what was it he wanted to say to her? Ann walked on a prey to varied feelings. She knew quite well that she didn’t care for Waring—not in the sense of affection and trust—but she did find his presence and this covert love-making exciting. And she hated herself for finding it so.

The attraction was entirely physical, but it was potent. What must she do? Ann found no answer to her questions; so she walked on quietly beside Mrs. Holmes until they came to the cottage, beyond which ​the shearers had pitched their tent. The cottage was the original station homestead, and was occupied now by the Pratt family, Marsh, Macdonald (the other station hand), and Dan the Maori. A creeper-covered veranda faced a small neglected garden full of straggling shrubs and rose-bushes, and at the back an old orchard and a patch of bush bordered the river bank. Ann halted at the gate leading into the cottage. It was not so much a desire to look at the place, seen dimly in the twilight, as to escape from Mrs. Holmes and Waring. They strolled on towards the camp fire, and she remained gazing across the over-grown flower beds towards the little old house. She tried to picture Dick Holmes with his two brothers, and his sister playing as children in this small garden, thirty years ago. Nice children they must have been, she decided, if they were anything like Holmes himself. But she would not meet them now, for the sister had long ago married and gone to live in England, and the two brothers lay sleeping at Gallipoli.

A voice from the other side of the hedge made her start.

“Come down to fill up the night-pen in the shed?” asked Rodney Marsh, smiling at her.

He wore no hat and his dark hair was wet and smoothed back from his sun-tanned face. The loose white shirt, open at the neck, showed the fine column of his throat, and across his shoulders dangled a colored towel.

“You’ve been in the river,” said Ann.

He nodded.

“We’ve got a swimming pool down at the back of the house there.”

​“Lucky you.”

“Do you like swimming?”

“Rather!”

“You should go over to the beach then.”

“Mrs. Holmes thinks it’s a little too early for the children to bathe yet awhile. But she’s promised to let me take them next week if it’s warm enough.”

He opened the gate, and came out to stand beside her.

“Well,” said Ann. “What’s the job I’m to help with? Filling the night-pen or something. I mean to learn this sheep-farming business, you know.”

He laughed.

“Have you got any idea what a night-pen is?”

“Not the foggiest.”

“It’s inside the shed. The sheep are kept in there ready for the morning’s shearing. If it rains, we’ve still got a shed full to start on.”

“Can’t you shear them wet?”

He laughed again.

“I suppose you’ll put damp wool in the press when you start sheep-farming.”

“Not if it’s wrong. I’ll have learnt how to do the right thing by that time. A good-natured head-shepherd will have taught me.”

“He’ll be a chap with a lot of time on his hands, won’t he?”

“Show me the night-pen.”

“Sheep-farmers don’t go into the shed in white silk dresses,” said Marsh.

“It’s crêpe-de-Chine and georgette,” she corrected him.

“How should I know what it is?”

​“And how should I know about night-pens and damp wool and sheep?”

Marsh was looking down at her, the laughter in his eyes answering the mischief in her own.

“What are you doing down here alone, anyway?”

“I’m not alone. I came with Mrs. Holmes and Mr. Waring.”

“Oh, Waring!” His tone of easy contempt made Ann look up at him sharply.

“You don’t like Mr. Waring?”

He shrugged.

“He’s not my boss. We’re in the polo team together. Beyond that I don’t bother my head about him, one way or the other.”

A horseman passed them, coming from the Maoris’ camp. He slowed up a little, peering at the two figures in the half-light.

“Isn’t that Hicky?”

“Yes.” His face had darkened.

“And you don’t like Hicky, either?”

“No,” he answered shortly.

The big half-caste had ridden on a little way. Now he turned and came back. Close beside the gate he dismounted.

“Good evening,” he said to Ann, raising his hat.

Ann murmured, “Good evening,” in reply, but she did not at all appreciate the familiar leer with which he eyed her.

Turning to Marsh he said something in Maori, and Marsh, without one moment’s hesitation, hit him under the jaw, and knocked him down. His horse pulled back, snorting, and then galloped off with trailing bridle across the paddock. In a second Hicky was on his feet, and the battle was joined.

​Ann had never seen two men fight before. Had she been a boxing expert she would have realized that here she had something worth watching. The two men were equally matched, and they were both skilled performers, but the science of the exhibition was lost on Ann; she was merely filled with horror and dismay. Not so the Maori shearers. They came running from the camp fire to form a delighted ring about the combatants—cheering on first one, and then the other! Mrs. Holmes and Waring were nowhere to be seen. Ann, nearly as white as her white frock, hemmed in by excited Maori men and women, stood an unwilling spectator of this—to her—appalling and uncivilized conflict.

She had enough sense to realize, in spite of her inexperience in such matters, that this was no ordinary sparring match. It was a battle which would only end with the disablement of one or other of the combatants. Already they looked horrible, their hands and faces streaked with blood. This fight must be stopped before murder was committed! Ann stopped it. She simply sprang in between the two men during one second in which they were a pace apart, and clung to Rodney’s hands. Hicky—utterly taken aback at this obstruction—endeavored to pull himself up in a rush forward, missed his footing and fell. In the moment’s respite, Ann had pushed the bewildered Rodney through the gate, and closed it. She stood outside and faced Hicky, who was scrambling to his feet.

“Take yourself off this instant,” she said; and then turned to Marsh who was pulling at the gate. “Don’t you dare to move,” she said fiercely.

She wheeled again towards Hicky.

​“Go after your horse at once! At once, do you hear me?” she commanded.

Then to the Maoris:

“Back to your camp, all of you. Here’s the boss coming now across the paddock. He’ll fetch the police! Quick! Before there’s trouble.”

They obeyed her. Hicky obeyed her. Why, she never stopped to think. Perhaps the amazing spectacle of this slip of a girl in her white evening frock standing unafraid, and passionately angry, before them all was a trifle unnerving. The crowd dispersed, and she was left alone with Rodney Marsh.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” she asked indignantly. “Didn’t you say things hadn’t been too easy for Mr. Holmes lately? And now you deliberately make more trouble for him.”

Marsh’s attack had been anything but deliberate, but she didn’t stop to think of that, she was too incensed.

“Only this morning he was saying he hoped you wouldn’t be fool enough to let your private quarrels interfere with his work at shearing time, and now you’ve done it.”

“You don’t know what that… that brute said.”

Marsh was mopping his battered face with a red-stained handkerchief. Ann suddenly had a vision of a small boy being lectured by a school ma’am, and she would have been moved to laughter if she hadn’t felt so thoroughly infuriated.

“A silly boy! That’s all you are!” she said.

“Look here,” he began fiercely, and then his eyes fell on the blood-stains on her frock. “Your dress is ruined,” he ended lamely.

​“Of course it is. And it’s the only really nice evening frock I’ve got.”

“I’ll buy you another.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort. I wouldn’t accept one from you.”

He glared at her darkly.

“Think yourself a cut above me, I suppose.”

“I certainly do at the moment. If you’d cared two pins for Mr. Holmes, you’d have thought of him first, and not of your own silly pride.”

“It wasn’t pride. It was what he said about…” He stopped suddenly.

Ann, with a flash of intuition, knew that Hicky’s remark had been some reference to herself, but that this young man was not going to give her the satisfaction of knowing why the battle had been fought.

Looked at from this angle, the affair assumed a slightly different aspect. Ann’s anger against him cooled.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“Hurt?” he echoed roughly. “It’d take more than that to hurt me. And let me tell you you’ve done a damn silly thing. We should have fought it out to a finish.”

“What sort of a finish?” she asked scornfully. “Until one of you had killed the other?”

“Better that than stopping in the middle of a fight.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “If you want to kill each other, at least have the decency to wait until the shearing’s finished. You say Mr. Holmes is a white man. Well, behave like a white man yourself. Promise me you’ll wait to settle your difference with Hicky until after the shearing is finished, will you?”

​In her earnestness she placed her hand on his wrist. Marsh stood for a moment, looking down at it. In the fading light it might have been a little pale leaf blown by the wind against the hard, brown forearm.

“All right,” he said at last, in rather a queer tone. “I promise.”

“What’s been the trouble, Rodney?”

Holmes was at the gate, and from the other direction Mrs. Holmes and Waring were approaching. Ann slipped away to join them, while “the boss” interviewed his head-shepherd. But she gave no opportunity to Gerald Waring for any further attempt at flirtation. She reached her room, and was able to change her frock without its deplorable condition having been noticed. And pinned on her dressing-table she found a very badly scrawled note.

Ann laughed as she read it, but she was, nevertheless, very touched. The little girls were beginning to mean a great deal in her life, and somehow the feeling invoked by that funny scrawl, and the drawing of the two lopsided hearts, had the effect for the ​moment at least of diminishing Waring’s influence over her. The children trusted her. She wanted to be worth trusting.

She played bridge quite contentedly for the two hours before going to bed.