In the little lean-to which Sally had made so pretty for her with pink glazed-calico petticoats round the packing-case dressing-table and wash-stand, a pink crocheted wool comforter on the bed, and pictures cut from English illustrated magazines on the walls, Darien was pulling on the last pair of all the satin slippers Sally had brought from Home and finding them quite as much too tight as they had been last week. So thoughtless of Sally not to guess that Darien would grow the bigger of the two.

But, pinch or not, they must go on for the dinner-party. Darien smoothed down her soft creamy folds of India muslin and stood up. Sally's best gown, but she liked Darien to wear it since Darien couldn't make her own and Sally had no time with so many babies. Darien had no mind to look a fright, even if she wasn't so handsome as Sally had been … before the babies came.

The small looking-glass on the wall tossed back a pink-and-white face below auburn curls too short for ringlets and impudently tied up with a narrow blue ribbon. Darien took down the glass and studied her features carefully, since there was something in her somewhere which attracted men and she never could find out what it was. One might call her eyes green and her hair red and be done with it … but men wouldn't be done with it.

“Is it my mouth? That has a ravishing curve. Or perhaps my eyebrows?” she had once asked Nick Flower, who had laughed his quick harsh laugh and said: “You're as the devil made you, Darien. Don't meddle with his work.”

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Perhaps I have a fragrance, she thought, sniffing at her slender girlish arms. Certain smells made flies and bees wild for them … as Toby and Nat Graham were wild for Darien. They were only boys, but Darien could attract men too. All but Jermyn. With interest she watched the soft lines of her face hardening in the mirror. This must be what it meant to have the grande passion, since Jermyn was the only one she cared two pins about. He was far too beautiful and too popular to be wasted on missionary daughters who taught flat-nosed little Maoris in Sunday School and couldn't possibly make him tingle all over as Darien could make the Graham boys tingle.

“When I'm with you I can't think what I'm doing, Darien,” Nat was saying all the time, his brown eyes like a dog begging. If she could just once get Jermyn where he couldn't think what he was doing she'd grab him … and then let Celia Gray or Amy Mathers get him away if they could!

“Darien!” Darien stood still. Perhaps Sally would find someone else to do whatever it was she wanted done. But a second and third call took her reluctantly though the living-room (where they had all slept on fern during those first nights long ago) and into the lean-to, where Sally was bathing the babies. No big new house yet, since Mr Lovel was going to move to Auckland some day … and how Darien wished he'd be quick about it.

Roddy and Tiffany were already in their cots, jumping about in their long nightgowns and jabbering Maori to the chiefs Jermyn had painted for them on the scrim wall. Roddy had a yellow head and brown eyes like Jermyn. Some day he too would break hearts….

In the heavy wooden tub, coopered by the Beach carpenter, Brian and Baby Jerry were still splashing, and steam had made Sally's hair limper than ever. Her ringlets had gone long ago, but even the soft side-folds were ragged on either side of the thin face under the crooked cap. No woman could attract a man when she looked like page 40 that, but since it wouldn't be right for Sally to attract anyone perhaps it was all for the best.

Some of the tiredness went out of Sally seeing Darien so lightsome and lovely in the flickering candle-light. Darien was her very own. The only thing in the world really her own, since Mr Lovel never forgot that the children belonged to him. Rules and rules and rules laid down by Mr Lovel for the children's welfare. Such a very thorough person, Mr Lovel; and so kind of a gentleman busy carving civilization out of the wilderness to occupy himself with the arithmetic of a four-year-old Roddy.

“Darien dearest … if you wouldn't mind … there are just the two now to be dried and put into bed, and if I don't go Ani is sure to mix the sauces with the gravy.”

“Well, if you don't mind your best gown getting wet,” said Darien, resignedly spreading a towel on her knees and taking up the kicking Brian … who was so absurdly like a miniature Mr Lovel that no one could resist spanking him. Darien didn't resist … and so Ani had to put them to bed after all.

God (thought Sally, who never had time to go to church) having planned so many blessings for gentlemen pioneers—such as plenty of rum, and meetings where everyone said what they liked, and pantaloons which couldn't be nearly so uncomfortable in this almost tropical climate as the three long petticoats which no lady could go without—God really could not be expected to have much time left for women. But now she prayed mechanically “Please God” as she ran about the lean-tos, gave a last glance at the dinner-table (ladies must drink wine from cups since there were only enough glasses for the gentlemen), and dressed herself with hurried trembling fingers, hoping that Jerry wouldn't get colic during the evening, and being so grateful to darling Darien for singing the children to sleep.

Darien felt irritated. Sally must know she enjoyed page 41 singing … but she was generally grateful for the wrong things. She always tried to be grateful for Mr Lovel, who was the wrongest thing Darien knew. Yet even dinnerparties with that stiff black stick at the table-top were exciting now; with governors getting into the soup and war into everything, and Lady Lovel—who was always so sure she was intellectual that strangers generally believed it for a time—struggling to lift the conversation to a higher plane.

“I always think,” said Lady Lovel, looking like a crimson full-rigged ship with lots of stays and flags and things, “that Love is the greatest power and we should love the Maoris more instead of provoking them.”

To gentlemen provoked beyond measure by Maoris and governors this had the effect of dynamite. All began talking at once, with Peregrine waiting to get in the last effective word. None, he felt, had been so provoked as he. For Hobson, after starting a Capital near the Beach, calling it Russell, and appearing to take great interest in Peregrine, had suddenly sailed away to build another Capital further south. He named it Auckland, but everyone called it Hobson's Choice, and predicted that he would be building again before long. So there was Peregrine, left vulgarly in the lurch with his high plans, and only resisting a frantic impulse to follow Hobson (who must somewhere weave a Ministry round him, as surely as a spider must weave webs) by the fear that Hobson would presently go elsewhere.

Hobson did. Abrupt and inconsiderate as ever, he went, said the ladies piously, to Heaven. Peregrine couldn't concede that. No heaven would accept a man who, after so juggling with Lovels, had left his authority to a Shortland, now succeeded by a FitzRoy who was governing much worse than the other two … if possible.

“The greatest power,” said Peregrine now, very impressive in bottle-green body-coat and high stock, “is a good government.”

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“And we have apes, curse 'em,” declared Major Henry, tossing off his glass of Malaga. (Tradin'-ships did bring real wine though often monstrous short on other necessities.)

“Hobson should have joined up with the New Zealand Company,” said burly Captain Tovey decidedly. “I hear it is going ahead like the deuce.”

But gentlemen couldn't abide the New Zealand Company, which, having got out of the mud and into debt and called itself Wellington, was now reputed to be making its own laws without benefit of governors—who seemed so very far off, since it was quicker to meet them by way of Australia's distant Sydney than to go overland.

“With virgin country like the Beach,” began John, and at the word “virgin” Darien suddenly abandoned her squabble with Nat, who was trying to hold her hand under the table.

“You wouldn't call it virgin if you knew as much of it as I do,” she said. Major Henry bellowed. He always encouraged that impossible girl, thought Peregrine, overriding the chuckles round him with a broadside about the necessity for upholding governors since they were all the country had to cling to.

“Since toadying is the fashion, you mean,” said Jermyn, staring distastefully at Darien. How he did wish females would be females, keeping their place like Sally, quiet as a mouse in her plain grey gown. Sally was the perfect female; docile to her husband, bringing up a fine family, even producing a respectable dinner out of the monotonous Beach material. What more could man ask of a woman, thought Jermyn, very superior and celibate at the moment, having tired of experiments with the natives. Yet possibly he would marry Amy Mathers, who had lately embroidered him a pink text on perforated cardboard. “Oh, rest in the Lord,” said the text, and Jermyn had written her a sonnet for it. After all, thought page 43 Jermyn, sipping his wine, a man must marry, and Amy was a very good imitation of Sally.

There was singing later, for Captain Tovey must always be asked and Caroline never waited for invitations.

“‘Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast on yonder lea, on yonder lea,’” she shrilled, with a heated Jermyn chasing her on the accordion. Such a noisy shelter Caroline would make. Sally shut her eyes; then opened them to see big Nick Flower leaning on the wall beside her, and blushed because she didn't know him very well and there were such queer stories about him. But since Mr Lovel was building his first schooner for him he had to be asked to-night.

Mr Flower didn't speak; but he was looking at her so gravely, so kindly that suddenly she smiled, feeling somehow that she had found in this notorious man a troubled little boy whom no one else knew of. And she knew so much about troubled little boys.

“I'm glad you came to-night,” she said simply.

“That's kind of you.” His harsh voice sounded harsher to himself, his words incredibly stupid. Yet how tell this pale sweet lady that her mere presence was a benediction, a healing …? He stammered: “Always kind … doing so much for others. Little Kat's grandmother so grateful for the soup….”

“Oh! Oh, that was nothing.” The fair tired face with its blue patient eyes had gone scarlet and he could have kicked himself. Had she heard that Kati was his child? Well, what then? She must know what men were by now. But he couldn't resist an insane desire to put himself right with her.

“You understand what this life is. A man's so much alone, and it's all so easy….”

“Oh, hush!” She put her hand on his with a little fluttering touch. “Nobody has the right to judge any- page 44 one else, Mr Flower. Never. Never,” she repeated earnestly, and he saw her looking across the room at her husband.