Hermie was trembling like the little leaves around them—too surprised, too stricken with the newness of the situation even to slip out of his arms. The pleased young moon smiled down at them, the leaves whispered the news all along the bush, an exquisite perfume of flowers and trees and freshening grass rose up to them. How sweet something was—the clasp about her waist, the kisses that had rained upon her cheeks, the eager, beautiful words that still were beating in her ears!
'Oh, I don't understand, I don't understand,' said the excited girl, and burst into strange tears, and tried to move from his arms, and put a startled hand to her cheeks, to feel what difference those kisses had made.
'Did I frighten you—did I frighten you, my darling, my little girl?' he said. 'See there, don't tremble, I will take my arm away. It is too big and rough, isn't it? There, there, I won't even kiss you; let me hold your hand, there. You have only to understand that I love you, that I have always loved you—ever since you were a tiny thing of twelve, and I used to ride this way just for the pleasure of watching you. You were like no other child here, so slender and sweet and white and pink, and all that shining hair hanging round you. I think I wanted you always. I wanted to pick you up and put you on the saddle in front of me and ride away with you—away and away right out of the world. You will let me, darling? You will try to love me a little? You will be my own little wife?'
Wife! One of the Daly girls had just been married to a boundary rider near. Hermie had seen the lonely place where they were to live together with no one else to break the monotony.
Wife! All those dull, uninteresting women who came to call in Wilgandra were wives, all those dull, horrid men in Wilgandra were their husbands.
Be married; she, Hermie Cameron, like the girls in Miss Browne's books! Perhaps it might not be so very bad—they all seemed to look forward to it.
But to Mortimer Stevenson! Oh no, none of them ever married any one like that, the men there were all officers, penniless young artists and authors, or at least earls. Most of them had proud black eyes and cynical smiles, and spoke darkly of their youth. Or else they were debonair young men with laughing blue eyes and Saxon curly hair.
Mortimer! She had actually forgotten it was only Mortimer speaking all this time, Mortimer Stevenson, who wore red and blue painful ties, and grew red if she spoke to him, and knocked chairs over in his clumsiness, and had never been anywhere farther than Sydney, and thought Wilgandra and his father's station the nicest places in the world.
A cloud came over the happy moon, the leaves hung sad and still; from somewhere far away came the piteous wail of the curlew.
Hermie freed her hand and found her voice.