“Sweet, you are. I’ll get up now. Don’t worry. We’ve had inspectors here before-hundreds of them.”

Lightly kissing her hair, he moved to the door, looked back at her, and grinned because he didn’t feel like smiling this morning.

She heard him pass along the short passage to the front door and down the veranda steps. The train was rumbling into what was called the station, there being no platform, when she slipped into a gown, added fuel to the fire and proceeded to dress. ‘Just too bad,’ was the thought in hermind. After all that work, all the upset routine. Now it would seem that bigger and better brains were to take over.

What did they think her husband was? A new chum? Hadn’t he been born and reared at a homestead down on the south-west corner of the Plain? Hadn’t he been stationed here for six years, and wouldn’t take promotion because he loved every blessed mile of it? And why all the bother about such a woman?

It was all there in Elaine Easter’s mind as she watched the coffee bubbling and heard the chops sizzling.

Toward the end of the previous August, Myra Thomas had faced the charge of murder. The trial was staged in Adelaide, and in South Australia justice is rarely influenced by outside crack-pots.

She was twenty-seven, a smart dresser, and locally renowned as a radio script writer. The husband had been a radio actor, thirty-four years old, handsome, and, by all accounts, a perpetual drinker and an insatiable lover.

The Counsel for the Defence claimed that the husband had been the essence of a blackguard, and that the accused had long been a martyr to his mental frenzies and physical violence. The story went that the husband came home late from a ‘conference’. There had been ‘words’ between them, and he had rushed out to the garage for a pistol. Subsequently there was a struggle, the gun went off, the husband fell dead. Same old story, proving that Australians are not original.