I didn’t like the idea of hanging myself: I’d been with a party who found a man hanging in the Bush, and it was no place for a woman round where he was. And I’d helped drag two bodies out of the Cudgeegong river in a flood, and they weren’t sleeping beauties. I thought it was a pity that a chap couldn’t lie down on a grassy bank in a graceful position in the moonlight and die just by thinking of it—and die with his eyes and mouth shut. But then I remembered that I wouldn’t make a beautiful corpse, anyway it went, with the face I had on me.
I was just getting comfortably miserable when I heard a step behind me, and my heart gave a jump. And I gave a start too.
‘Oh, is that you, Mr Wilson?’ said a timid little voice.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Is that you, Mary?’
And she said yes. It was the first time I called her Mary, but she did not seem to notice it.
‘Did I frighten you?’ I asked.
‘No—yes—just a little,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know there was any one——’ then she stopped.
‘Why aren’t you dancing?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, I’m tired,’ she said. ‘It was too hot in the wool-shed. I thought I’d like to come out and get my head cool and be quiet a little while.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it must be hot in the wool-shed.’