“I expect you could say it better than I could,” he said hastily, adding when the grace had been offered: “Who are Mr and Mrs James?”

“The minister and his wife. Mr James is a lazy good-for-nothing dreamer, and Mrs James is a slave to him. That’s what Mother says. Someday I am going to ask Mr James what he dreams about. Have you any brothers and sisters? I haven’t. I heard Mrs James tell Mrs Lacey one day it was a shame that I didn’t have a brother or a sister.”

Bony shook his head. He was conscious that his table manners were being studied, and hoped they were being approved.

“No, I have no brothers and sisters,” he told her, and related how he had been found, when a small baby, in the shade of a sandalwood-tree in the far north of Queensland, and how he had found a mother in the matron of the mission station to which he had been taken. That produced many questions which had to be answered, for was she not his hostess and he her guest? His reward was the information that Constable Gleeson was her father’s only assistant, that the elder Mr Jason was considered “queer” by her mother, and by her father the essence of a broken-down actor, and that young Mr Jason had given her the name of Rose Marie because he loved her and was going to marry her some day, and that Detective Sergeant Redman who had come from Sydney was “just a horrid man.”

“Why was he horrid?” Bony asked, his own impression of Redman not having been good.

“ ’Coshe was.” Grey eyes flashed and the twin hair plaits were jerked into a half swing. “He was ever so rude to young Mr Jason. I hate the big police bully. That’s what Mr Gleeson calls him. I told Sergeant Redman that I hated him too, and he only laughed at me. When I told young Mr Jason about that he said he would punch Sergeant Redman on the nose if he came here again and laughed at me.”

“But why was Sergeant Redman rude to your young Mr Jason?” Bony pressed.

“ ’Cosyoung Mr Jason wouldn’t answer all his silly old questions.”