not satisfied with McKeith's
views upon the financial question, and had some difficulty in getting
him to tie up even the insignificant sum of three thousand pounds in
settlement upon his wife. Colin pointed out that his capital was all
invested in cattle, and that though things would be all right as long
as there were good seasons, a bad one would cripple him, and he would
need money to recoup his losses and buy fresh stock. Bridget took his
view and Sir Luke frowned, but did what he considered his duty so far
as the paltry settlement went. At all events, it was a satisfaction to
Colin McKeith's shrewd Scotch mind that nobody insisted upon getting
the better of him in the matter. He knew that Bridget never gave it a
second thought. She was much more interested in the social and racial
problems of this new country of her adoption, and especially in the
blacks. What time she could spare from her trousseau she spent in
reading books about them, which some of her official friends got her
from the Parliamentary Library, and had already learned to think of
herself as a 'bujeri* White Mary,' whose mission it might be to compose
the racial feud between blackman and white.

[*Bujeri--Black's term of commendation.]

To Colin, knowing now the tragedy of his youth, she did not speak much
on this subject. The time went with startling rapidity. The two were
borne on the tide of Colin's wild elation and Bridget's more impersonal
enthusiasms. They were like travellers steaming through strange seas,
not knowing what they were going to find at the end of the voyage and
too excited to care.

That was the way of Bridget O'Hara, but it was not the way of Colin
McKeith.

Yet his closest intimates would scarcely have known him at this period.
He was as a man bewitched, with intervals only of his ordinary
commonsense. In these intervals the consciousness of glamour made him
vaguely uneasy.

Had Joan Gildea been there she would have seen all this and would have
observed signs of over-strain in Bridget--something faintly
apprehensive yet obstinately determined. And Joan would have understood
that when an O'Hara woman gets the bit between her teeth, she will not
stop to look back or to consider whither she is galloping. Bridget kept
herself continually on the go. Latterly, even Colin was warned by her
nervous restlessness. When they were alone together, which was not
long, nor often, her body seemed never still, her tongue rarely at
rest