ion of danger to white men in the
out-districts. How far had officialdom penetrated into the back blocks?
He understood that Mr McKeith had explored for the laying of a
telegraph-line to the Big Bight. Could Mr McKeith give him any
information about all that?

McKeith explained again. He had stopped a week, he said, at the last
outpost of Leichardt's land civilisation. The telegraph master there
lived in a hut made of sheets of corrugated zinc, raised on piles
twenty feet high and fortified against the Blacks. The entrance to it
was masked, spear-proof and had two men always on guard--there were
four men at the post. McKeith told a gruesome story of an assault by
the natives, and of rifles at work through gun-holes in the zinc tower.

Lady Bridget listened in silence. Now and then, she looked up at
McKeith, and, though her eyes gave forth ominous red-brown sparks, they
had in them something of the same unwilling fascination Joan Gildea had
noticed in the eyes of Colin McKeith.

CHAPTER 10

In the drawing room, before the men came in, Bridget talked to Joan
Gildea. They hadn't yet had, as Biddy reminded her, a regular
outpouring. The outpouring it should be stated, was always mostly on
Bridget's side.

'When did you start Socialism?' Mrs Gildea asked. 'That's something
new, isn't it?'

Biddy gave one of her slow smiles in which lips, eyes, brows, what
could be seen of them under her towzle of hair--all seemed to light up
together.

'Why, I've always been a Socialist--in theory, you know. I've ALWAYS
rebelled against the established order of things.'

'But latterly,' said Joan, 'I haven't heard anything about your
doings--not since you wrote from Castle Gaverick after--after Mr
Willoughby Maule's marriage?'

The light died out of Bridget's face. 'Ah, I'll tell you--Do you know,
Rosamond saw them--the Willoughby Maules before we all left. She met
them at Shoolbred's--buying furniture. Rosamond said SHE was dragging
after him looking--a bundle--and cross and ill; and that he seemed
intensely bored. Poor Will!'

There was silence, Bridget's thoughts seemed far away.

'But about the Socialism?' prompted Mrs Gildea.

'Oh well, Aunt Eliza made up her mind suddenly to consult her new
doctor--Aunt Eliza's chief excitement is changing her doctors, and she
grows quite youthful in the process. They say that love and religion
are the chief emotional interests of unattached women. I should add on
doctors when