Potch looked at him dazedly.
"Didn't they tell you—?" he began.
Her father had closed his hands over the stones and opal dirt.
"I'm going in now," he said, thrusting the opals into the bag.
He had gone towards the house again, shouting: "We're on opal! On opal!"
Sophie followed him indoors. Mrs. Grant had met her father on the threshold of the room where her mother was.
"Why didn't you come when I sent for you?" she asked.
"I didn't think it could be as bad as you made out—that she was really dying," Sophie could hear her father saying again. "And we'd just struck opal, me and Jun, struck it rich. Got two or three stones already—great stuff, lovely pattern, green and orange, and fire all through the black potch. And there's more of it! Heaps more where it came from, Jun says. We're next Watty and George Woods—and no end of good stuff's come out of that claim."
Mrs. Grant stared at him as Potch had done. Then she stood back from the doorway of the room behind her.
Every gesture of her father's, of Mrs. Grant's, and of Michael's, was photographed on Sophie's brain. She could see that room again—the quiet figure on the bed, light golden-brown hair, threaded with silver, lying in thin plaits beside the face of yellow ivory; bare, thin arms and hands lying over grey blankets and a counter-pane of faded red twill; the window still framing a square of twilight sky on which stars were glittering. Mrs. Grant had brought a candle and put it on the box near the bed, and the candle light had flared on Mrs. Grant's figure, showing it, gaunt and accusing, against the shadows of the room. It had showed Sophie her father, also, between Michael and Mrs. Grant, looking from one to the other of them, and to the still figure on the bed, with a dazed, penitent expression....