‘You accept the responsibility, mind; I won’t interfere.’
As it turned out, Mrs. Wharton was still in Perth, and the Harleys had gone to Adelaide. So when they drove up to a house in the suburbs, surrounded by an unusually well-kept garden, and half-covered with a purple flowering tacsonia, a tall and beautiful girl, very well dressed, walked forth, and was introduced as Miss Jean White. Mrs. Lilburne’s face became expressive.
‘Oh, I see! No one else but the “Fair Maid of Perth” to be found—what a search you must have made. However, I trust you will be as successful in another quest one of these fine days. You have my best wishes, at any rate.’
‘I feel sure of that, Mrs. Lilburne, or I shouldn’t be here now, should I?’
‘I suppose you mean that trifling affair after the skirmish of Pilot Mount.’
‘Not at all. Much more serious—the fever I [223] ]brought with me from Salt Lake. I don’t easily give up, yet I really thought I was gone then. But I see your husband and Miss Jean are getting on quite nicely, and old Hotspur is beginning to paw the ground preparatory to rearing. We had better start.’
One touch—a mere hint from the rein, and away go the fast, impatient pair. The road is smooth, sandy, and just sufficiently firm to make the going perfect; no trees to speak of, a dead level for many a mile, with a faint blue range of hills on the farthest horizon. There had been a shower or two—the dust was minimised.
The low sun brought with it the promise of a graduated coolness, operating until midnight. The conditions of travel were perfect. As the light vehicle, behind the pick of the city harness pairs, swept smoothly on, the sensation was, in its way, pleasurably exciting; the feeling of vast, almost illimitable space—the dry, warm air—the absence of sound or movement other than the slight disturbance caused by the quick hoof-beats and faint whirring of their own wheels, which seemed like a rash intrusion into a vast, hostile, formless region. For a short time conversation had ceased—simultaneously. Miss White was gazing dreamily into the ultimate west, where the cloud scheme had resolved itself into a vast sheet of crimson and gold, deepening at the edges to orange, with gradually intruding blends of lake, pale green and violet.
‘A penny for your thoughts, Jean,’ said Mrs. Lilburne. ‘And suppose we make it binding on [224] ]all four of us. We seem to have been suddenly stricken dumb. I wonder what the occult influence could have been? Miss White is to speak first.’
‘I was thinking,’ said the girl, ‘of the strangeness of life here. Civilisation on one hand, with books, music, London fashions, art novelties, scarcely a month old—all the great world’s great events published at breakfast time from day to day. On the other hand, to quote dear Sir Walter, “a sun-scorched desert, brown and bare”—and here come the camels to fill in the picture!’ As she spoke, a long train wound round the edge of a line of hillocks—their leader, with turbaned attendants, adding the Eastern tone and flavour to the apparition from the underworld.