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Bret said abruptly:

“It's ugly. It can't go on, Susan.”

She agreed: “No,” still without looking at him. And then she asked half-absently, “Why don't you want the divorce, Bret?”

He frowned, marshalling for her the reasons he had, not long ago, been discovering for himself.

“I like you, I admire you, I want you, and I want children.”

It sounded, he thought, very adequate. But the bleakness of the smile in her quick glance flung up before him again baffling mysteries impenetrable to him. He said angrily:

“And sound enough reasons, too.”

She said dryly:

“Very rational indeed.”

“They don't satisfy you?”

“They don't satisfy me at all.”

He said, “Hell!” under his breath and sat down again. He asked desperately:

“Then why don't
you
want it?”

There wasn't any bleakness in the smile she gave him
then. It warmed her pallor, lit her eyes, twisted something in him with sudden pain.

“I'm afraid I'm not very rational,” she said.

He put his hand out and touched her foot.

“What a mess it is!”

“Yes. I'm sorry you got dragged into it.”

“You meant,” he said, at last with an effort, “that in spite of all the mess you – don't want to leave me. Is that it?”

She put her chin on her hand and began to scribble on the ground with a piece of stick. She said drearily:

“It isn't quite as simple as that. What it amounts to is that I – can't leave you. Even if we were divorced, even if I went right away, out of the country – I'd still be in love with you.” And she added quickly, “Don't tell me I'm young and I'll get over it.”

“I wasn't going to.” He looked at her curiously. “Your point is that a divorce wouldn't free you at all.”

“It wouldn't free me of what I feel for you, and – it would —”

“Well?”

“It would take me away from Coolami.”

He stared.

“Would you mind that?”

She said angrily, blinking her eyes.

“Of course I'd mind it.”

He stood up again and walked restlessly to the cliff-edge. It was there all round him again; Coolami. A possession which instinctively he snatched to himself, hearing some alien footfall— He didn't know at all which of many warring emotions was uppermost in his mind; he didn't know whether the newcomer was an enemy, an invader to be jealously repelled, an admirer to be condescendingly admitted – a fellow-worshipper of his treasure – to be welcomed perhaps – to share?—

He said over his
shoulder:

“For what it may be worth to you, a divorce would certainly free you in one way—”

And with his words pictures ran fiercely through his mind as he knew they were running, too, through hers. He remembered his visit to Ballool two months ago.

He remembered a drive back with her from a theatre when slowly mounting dark tides in him had broken into storm as he stopped the car in front of the steps— She was pulling her cloak round her, and he had put his arm across and re-closed sharply the door she had opened.

“Susan!” His voice sounded queer even to himself, but her little gasp and involuntary recoil made him suddenly furious. Blast the girl, what did she take him for? He said hurtfully:

“Why try this shrinking virgin stuff with me? Do you expect me to believe it?”

She answered bitterly, breathless:

“I don't expect you to believe anything good of me – ever!”

The faint scent which was always about her and all her belongings – camphor and something else, it smelt like, had forced back on his memory ever since, those ugly moments. She didn't struggle – only resisted, mentally and physically rigid, and at last her absolute passivity had chilled him. He could see her in the half darkness, sitting very still, crouching almost, in the corner of the seat with her hair dishevelled and her arms over her face. He'd realised, in a moment of acute shame and nausea, her utter helplessness. He'd
leaned across her abruptly and opened the door, and she had pulled her cloak round her shoulders and disappeared without a word. He'd taken the car round to the garage and sat in it for a long time with his elbows on the steering-wheel and his forehead resting on his hands—

And he wondered now, looking moodily across the valley, which of several such scenes she was remembering—

But she had begun to laugh helplessly. She had a pretty laugh with an upward running inflection; it always called quite irresistibly to an answering smile in him. He asked, turning:

“What's the joke?”

She looked rather downcast. “I – it wasn't a joke really. It was horrid when it happened. It would be horrid, I suppose, if it happened again. But it suddenly seemed funny.” She glanced at him apologetically.

He said: “Tell me about it,” wishing that a mutual sense of humour were all that was needed for matrimonial felicity. But she hesitated. Because actually it had all been so definitely and abruptly unpleasant that she was not sure now where in its murky shadows she had caught her momentary gleam of the comic.

She'd been brushing her hair, and then in a second she was off her balance, the stiff bristles digging into her neck, her throat strained backward painfully beneath the violence of his kiss. In a panic of sheer physical pain she had fought insanely. The buckle of his wrist-watch had made a long crimson scratch on her arm. Misery and weakness had taken the fight out of her suddenly and she'd crumpled up with a sobbed appeal:

“Bret – don't –
you're hurting me so!”

His hands had dropped to his sides and they had stood rather dazedly staring at each other. He looked at her arm.

“Did I do that?”

“It – was your watch, I think.” She'd pulled her wrapper over it and laughed nervously. “It's nothing – it was just that I could hardly breathe.”

He'd said, “What the hell's the matter with us, Susan?” And looked at her as if he expected her to know the answer—

And somehow, in that there had been a laugh. She said, “I was thinking – do you remember when you scratched me with your wrist-watch?”

He looked at her blankly. “Were you laughing at that?”

“I – Bret – if we – supposing you were in love you'd laugh too. It would seem so – absurd – so much a complicating of things that aren't really complicated – I don't suppose you see what I mean —”

He said grimly:

“I only see that I lost my head and my temper. It doesn't amuse me much. That's what I mean you'd be free of if we were divorced.”

She said soberly:

“There won't be any more scenes like that.”

And when he stared at her uncomprehendingly, she said with a sudden flame, “Well, I'm coming back with you, aren't I? We'll be home to-morrow. I'm not a fool, Bret.”

He shook his head ruefully.

“If good intentions could make a marriage, Susan, ours would be a winner. We've both tried hard enough.”

She stood up
looking at him with a strange little smile.

“The tea's probably cold,” she said. “Dad's been saying, ‘Call them,' and Mother's been saying, ‘Leave them alone.' Come on, Bret.”

He followed her. Half-way up the path she paused and looked back at him.

“Trying's no good,” she said. “I'm going to playact.”

He said sharply:

“Don't do that. At least you've been honest. Acting won't help us.”

Her smile curled into open contempt.

“You won't know it's acting,” she said.

No, Drew thought,
sipping his mug of strong tea and watching them come up the path, Millicent's elaborately wangled tête-à-tête hadn't done much good after all. Susan walking ahead with her chin up looked – well, when she was a kid, her father thought grimly, that expression on her face had many times been followed by a spanking!

What the deuce, he wondered, passing Millicent two mugs for them, had she been saying to that husband of hers to make him look so white about the gills? And in a sudden surge of sympathy for a harassed fellow-male he decided that women were the very devil – and his daughter in the first flight of them—

So he made room for Bret on the rug, passed him his tea, offered him sugar, plied him with sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, assuring him mutely of his moral support in a world most insufferably complicated by the moods and the whimsies of women.

Susan, disdaining the rug, had perched on a rock nearby. She was merry and voluble, talking at Bret and round him, her words darting, stinging, retreating, stinging again. There wasn't, Drew marvelled irritably, anything you could get hold of at all, and yet she kept you wincing, not so much from what she had said as from what you thought she was going to say next. You couldn't ignore her any more than you could ignore a wasp circling within inches of your head. Not
that Bret wasn't making a very good show of it, looking at the valley, eating his way stolidly and silently through a large ham sandwich—

Drew looked helplessly at Millicent.

Lord how these women hung together. She was staring at her daughter with unmixed pity, and she said suddenly:

“Susan, bring your breakfast, and walk along to that point with me.”

Susan stopped in mid-sentence and faded. It did really seem to her father as though Millicent's words had turned out a light somewhere inside her. Her eyes flickered for a moment, startled like the eyes of some one suddenly awakened. She bit into her hard-boiled egg, looked at Bret, looked at her mother, stood up:

“All right, Mother. Come on.”

They went. Drew cleared his throat and said weightily to Bret:

“A queer thing, that blue. Never been satisfactorily explained, I understand —”

Bret said, “No?” refilling his mug from the billy. For the second time that morning he was staggered by his own capacity for silent fury. No one, nothing in the world had ever got under his skin as surely as Susan – or Susan's pride, or Susan's misery, or whatever it was that drove her when she had these devilish and impossible moods—

But this time beneath his anger some obscure, panicky doubt was pricking him.

“You won't know it's acting.”

There was, in that, an implied contempt for his perceptiveness that bit deeper because of an uneasy suspicion that it might be justified. Would he? She must, he reasoned, be pretty damn sure of herself to say that. As a burglar, who said, “I'm going to break into your house to-night by the kitchen window,” would need to be pretty damn sure that his victim was a half wit. “
You won't know
—”

Did she think him that? Emotionally half-witted? And with the phrase he was aware of a sudden revelation. Was that what it was–this confounded love business–a sixth sense? It sounded all right. I see, I taste, I smell, I hear, I feel, I love. Plausible, quite. Which meant, seeing that your emotions came to you through your senses, that you were, lacking that sixth sense, an emotional half-wit—

And if it meant that, it meant also that no emotion came to you complete. No music stirred you to the full range of its power; no beauty yielded you the completeness of its perfection. No flavour, no scent, no touch—

He began to see things, dimly. Susan backing away a step or two from him last night before she realised what she was doing. Susan standing still looking so desperately miserable that he'd sworn under his breath with uncomprehending exasperation, and gone out on the balcony to sit on the stretcher-bed so tactfully and casually left there by Millicent, and smoke, and think, and rage—

Well, he was seeing glimmers of what might be daylight now. He was getting very vaguely and uncertainly somewhere near her point of view. He remembered a fellow who'd come up with Ken, once to Coolami. Who'd gone round the place staring and appraising, who'd seen it all in the green bursting vigour of a good
season, who'd watched the lorries loaded with wool-bales go out in file, as glamorous a sight as any treasure-laden fleet of Spanish galleons; who'd ridden with him over sprawling acres more securely his kingdom than the lands of many a crowned monarch. Who'd nodded reflectively at last and conceded: “Well, I suppose it pays all right—”

Was it from some such blundering obtuseness in himself that Susan had backed away last night? Could you blame her if it was? If an instinct she couldn't quite subdue withheld her from giving him something he hadn't the necessary sense – the sixth sense – to appreciate?

So that finally, of this obtuseness, this half-wittedness of his senses, she was driven to make an ignoble ally. When the time came, which was so close upon them, for the inevitable compromise, it would be these senses she would beguile – as one might beguile some shuffling moron – secure in the knowledge of his emotional deformity—

And he wouldn't know—

He stood up so suddenly that he upset his forgotten mug of tea, and began mechanically to brush away with his handkerchief a few splashes on his sock and trouser-leg.

The thought that her savage little gibe might be true appalled him. He wouldn't know, because he hadn't the sense to know with. Any more than he could know if he were blind, all the loveliness of Coolami, or hear if he were deaf that sudden far-away chorus of tolwongs from the valley—

Drew asked:

“What's wrong? Jumper ant bite you?”

Bret laughed:

“No –
no thanks – nothing – I – I just thought I saw one on my leg —”

“There are some about. Painful, the sting, for a moment or two. Funny thing the way it starts to itch like hell about a week after you've been bitten —”

“No,” replied Bret absently, and his father-in-law said, “Hey?” glanced at him sharply and muttered, “Oh, well – better be getting on, perhaps —”