V

Mab had already joined one of them. When he put up his pistol he stood still on the veranda in the quiet night that was busy as usual about its own affairs: drawing out sharp fragrance from flowering broom, geranium leaves, myrtle, touching with moonbeam dead-white trees on the near hill and the sundial between flower borders; pausing to listen to the bark of a possum up in the she-oaks, the crisp clatter of hoofs far off on the Main Road, and then waking the breeze over the river that rushed round the bend below, flaring a pale ripple.

In the salon Madam sang joyously to her harp:
"Ce petit homme tant joli;
Qui toujours cause et toujours rit,
Qui toujours baise sa mignonne,
Dieu gard' de mal ce petit homme."

Mab quailed, the shy and passionate adventurer in him suddenly sure that any easy laughing and kissing the girl was not for him. A man who dares love a goddess, he reflected, is punished aforehand. Down by the summer-house was now a gauzy fluttering, a white gleam which disappeared. Mab was parting the vines above the door before Julia had sat down on the bench as though quite sweetly unconscious that even her easy mother would cry out at behaviour so shocking in a young lady. At Mab's arrival her agitation was so exquisite that the poor fool had no words. She faltered: "It was so hot within…. I never dreamed … I must go."

page 67

"Julia, I think God brought you here," said Mab then, annexing the Deity as firmly as he would have annexed anything else which might hold her there. "Oh, my darling, can't you give me one little moment …"