would get to feel as much at home in as he did
himself--in time.

He left her at her bedroom door, kissing her hand with the native
chivalry that sat well upon him, and went back to his pipe and the
waking dreams of an ardent but self-restrained lover who had practical
as well as romantic considerations to weigh. Bridget went to sleep with
the smell of his tobacco--and yet did not seem to mind it in the
least--coming in whiffs through the door cracks and filling her
nostrils. She too dreamed--a vivid dream, but by some law of
contrariety, not of any idyllic camping ground in the Never-Never Land.
She dreamed that she was seeing the Carnival at Nice--a medley of
dancing waves, azure sky, palms, gold-laden orange trees and white
green-shuttered houses--flowers, CONFETTI, masks, grotesque pageantry,
the merry music of the South. And though he had never been with her at
Nice, Willoughby Maule came into her dream. They were doing impossible
things--dancing together in the Carnival crowd, flinging confetti,
bobbing and grimacing before the comic masks. Then the carnival scene
seemed to turn flat, and to become a painted picture on the drop
curtain of a stage, and she started up at the sound of knocks such as
one hears before the curtain rises in a French theatre.

CHAPTER 5

Her husband was at her door calling her in the grey of dawn. He had
everything ready he said. She dressed fumblingly as if she were still
in her dream, and they walked to the station-shed whither the baggage
had already gone. The sun was only a little way above the horizon when
they took their places in the bush train that was to bear her on the
second stage of her journey into the Unknown. Such a wheezy, shaky
little train, and such funny, ugly country! Sandy flats sparsely grown,
mostly with gum trees, where there were no houses and gardens. Near the
township there were a good many of these wooden dwellings with
corrugated iron roofs--some of the more aged ones of slab--and with a
huge chimney at one end. They were set in fenced patches of millet and
Indian corn or gardens that wanted watering and with children perched
on the top rail of the fences who cheered the train as it passed.
Sometimes the train puffed between lines of grey slab fencing in which
were armies of white skeleton trees that had been 'rung' for
extermination, or with bleached stumps sticking up in a chaos of felled
trunks, while in some there had sprung up sickly iron-bark