"Don't make eyes at me, sir," said Jack, laughing. "I know better than you what life means."
"You do, do you? Oh you do?" said the old man. And he laughed too. Somehow it made him feel warm and easy. "A fine crazy affair it would be if it were left to you." And he laughed loud at the absurdity.
II
Jack persuaded Mary to go with Mr. George and himself to look at Grant Farm. Mary and the old lawyer went in a buggy, Jack rode his own horse. And it seemed to him to be good to be out again in the bush and forest country. It was rainy season, and the smell of the earth was delicious in his nostrils.
He decided soon to leave the mine. It was running thin. He could leave it in charge of Tom. And then he must make some plans for himself. Perhaps he would come and live on the Grant Farm. It was not too far from Perth, or from Wandoo, it was in the hills, the climate was balmy and almost English, after the goldfields, and there were trees. He really rejoiced again, riding through strong, living trees.
Sometimes he would ride up beside Mary. She sat very still at Mr. George's side, talking to him in her quick, secret-seeming way. Mary always looked as if the things she was saying were secrets.
And her upper lip with its down of fine dark hair, would lift and show her white teeth as she smiled with her mouth. She only smiled with her mouth: her eyes remained dark and glistening and unchanged. But she talked a great deal to Mr. George, almost like lovers, they were so confidential and so much in tune with tone another. It was as if Mary was happy with an old man's love, that was fatherly, warm, and sensuous, and wise and talkative, without being at all dangerous.
When Jack rode up, she seemed to snap the thread of her communication with Mr. George, her ready volubility failed, and she was a little nervous. Her eyes, her dark eyes, were afraid of the young man. Yet they would give him odd, bright, corner-wise looks, almost inviting. So different from the full, confident way she looked at Mr. George. So different from Monica's queer yellow glare. Mary seemed almost to peep at him, while her dark face, like an animal's muzzle with its slightly heavy mouth, remained quite expressionless.
It amused him. He remembered how he had kissed her, and he wondered if she remembered. It was impossible, of course, to ask her. And when she talked, it was always so seriously. That again amused Jack. She was so voluble, especially with Mr. George, on all kinds of deep and difficult subjects. She was quite excited, just now about authoritarianism. She was being drawn by the Roman Catholic Church.
"Oh," she was saying, "I am an authoritarian. Don't you think that the whole natural scheme is a scheme of authority, one rank having authority over another?"