“Martha lost her shoes again?” he asked with a soft chuckle.

He was a big man, about fifty years of age. Clean-shaven, his features, burned almost brown, denoted the outdoor man and dweller under a sub-tropical sun. He had clear, deep-grey, observant eyes.

“Wasn’t it Napoleon who, after restoring order in France, tried all he could to make her one of the Great Powers, if not the greatest?” she asked, with apparent irrelevance.

“I believe it was,” agreed the squatter, accepting tea and cake.

“Wasn’t it his ambition, when he had brought chaos to order, to maintain order by a European peace?”

“Well, what of it?” counter-queried Mr Thornton, reminded of his wife’s hero-worship of the great soldier of France.

“Only, that every time he enforced peace on the continent of Europe, to allow his governmental machine to run smoothly, it was constantly being put out of action by the grit of a fresh coalition formed by England. England was his bugbear. Martha’s naked feet are my bugbear.”

“Well, well, we must remember that Martha once was a semi-wild thing,” Thornton urged indulgently. “Doesn’t it ever surprise you that Martha, who has been with us for twenty years, has never wanted to return to her tribe?”

“It does sometimes.”

“It’s the one exception to the rule,” he said. “And that’s that. I suppose you’re now counting the hours?”

“I am. Ralph’s train reaches Bourke at eleven, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. They should be here about three.”

“I quite expect he will have grown enormously,” she said with wistful eyes.

“He will certainly be a man. Nineteen years old yesterday. Even five months makes a big difference to a lad of that age.”

For a while they were silent. Having finished his morning tea, the man lit a cigarette and the woman pensively picked up her sewing. Her boy was coming home from college, and she ached for the feel of his strong arms around her. To her it had been a sacrifice to agree to his spending the last Christmas vacation with friends in New Zealand. She had not seen the boy, whom she passionately loved, for five long months, and was as tremulous as a woman standing on a jetty watching the arrival of her sailor husband’s ship.