"Mr. Durham! You forget!"
Her voice fell like a whip-lash, cold, haughty, stern.
"I forbid you ever to speak to me so again. Good night."
She swept past him and entered the house, closing the door after her.
Hours passed before he could obtain control over his thoughts, before he could face the blackness her rejection of his declaration had brought upon him. Then he rose and stood staring blankly out over the sombre mystery of the bush, long since bereft of the faint glimmer of the new-born moon, veiled in shade, silent as the thin wisps of filmy mist which floated in the still air along the course of Waroona Creek.
In the morning Mrs. Burke met him without a trace in her voice, face, or manner of the resentful indignation she had shown on the previous night. She talked, as she had talked on many a morning at the breakfast-table, with an uninterrupted flow of chatter, inconsequential, airy, frivolous. She met his eyes openly, frankly, without a glimmer to show she noticed the lines which furrowed his face. Yet they were so marked that when Brennan drove out for him later, he glanced at his superior officer with apprehension.
"Do you think you are well enough to return to duty, sir?" he asked. "You don't look half so well as you did yesterday, and you were not looking too well then. If a few more days' rest——"
"Oh, I'm very fit, Brennan," Durham interrupted. "You had better turn the horses out for an hour or so; Mrs. Burke insists on my waiting to have lunch before I go."
Mrs. Burke came out to them as they stood talking.
"Oh, Brennan, did you see old Patsy in the town?" she exclaimed.