"It's all right, Bully," she said. "I know ... you weren't yourself ... and you didn't mean it."
He started to his feet and came to stand beside her. Sophie put her hand in his; he gripped it hard, unable to say anything. Then, when he could control his voice, he said:
"I went over to see Mr. Henty this morning ... and told him if anybody else 'd done what I did, I'd 've done what he did."
Potch had said the men expected Bully would want to fight the thing out when he was sober, and it was a big thing for him to have done what he had. The punishing power of Bully's fists was well known, and he had taken this way of punishing himself. Sophie understood that, She was grateful and reconciled to him.
"I'm glad, Bully," she said. "Let's forget all about it."
So the matter ended. But it all came back to her as she saw the broken red line on Arthur Henty's forehead.
She did not know that because of it she was an object of interest to the crowd on the veranda. News of Arthur Henty's bout with Bully Bryant had been very soon noised over the whole countryside. Most of the men who came to the ball from Langi-Eumina and other stations had gleaned varied and highly-coloured versions, and Arthur had been chaffed and twitted until he was sore and ashamed of the whole incident. He could not understand himself—the rush of rage, instinctive and unreasoning, which had overwhelmed him when he hit out at Bully.
His mother protested that it was a shame to give Arthur such a bad time for what was, after all, merely the chivalrous impulse of any decent young man when a girl was treated lightly in his presence; but the men and the girls who were staying at the station laughed and teased all the more for the explanation. They pretended he was a very heroic and quixotic young man, and asked about Sophie—whether she was pretty, and whether it was true she sang well. They redoubled their efforts, and goaded him to a state of sulky silence, when they knew she was coming to the ball.
Arthur Henty had been conscious for some time of an undercurrent within him drawing him to Sophie. He was afraid of, and resented it. He had not thought of loving her, or marrying her. He had gone to the tank paddock in the afternoons he knew she would be there, or had looked for her on the Warria road when she had been to the cemetery, with a sensation of drifting pleasantly. He had never before felt as he did when he was with Sophie, that life was a clear and simple thing—pleasant, too; that nothing could be better than walking over the plains through the limpid twilight. He had liked to see the fires of opal run in her eyes when she looked at him; to note the black lines on the outer rim of their coloured orbs; the black lashes set in silken skin of purest ivory; the curve of her chin and neck; the lines of her mouth, and the way she walked; all these things he had loved. But he did not want to have the responsibility of loving Sophie: he could not contemplate what wanting to marry her would mean in tempests and turmoil with his family.
He had thought sometimes of a mediæval knight wandering through flowering fields with the girl on a horse beside him, in connection with Sophie and himself. A reproduction of the well-known picture of the knight and the girl hung in his mother's sitting-room. She had cut it out of a magazine, and framed it, because it pleased her; and beneath the picture, in fine print, Arthur had often read: