This rain coming after the hot and dry months of summer had filled her with a kind of ecstasy and, breathing the warm, moisture-laden air, she had stood often and long on the west veranda watching the rain falling upon the great empty bed of Meena Lake. The rain held no significance in the long-delayed appearance of her son, but its first music was now a noise preventing her hearing the sound of hoof beats.

History repeats itself!

Twelve years ago she had stood in this same doorway, listening for hoof beats and hearing only the rain on the roof, on the leaves of the orange-trees, then so small, and on the roofs of the distant, night-masked outbuildings. She had waited hour after hour till the dawn had paled the sky. There were four hands employed on the station then. She had wakened them, given them breakfast, and sent them with two of the blacks to find her husband. He was lying beneath the body of his horse that had broken a leg in a rabbit burrow, and they had brought him home all wet and cold and smeared with mud. Now no men were working on Meena save her son and Jimmy Partner, and this night they were both somewhere out in the darkness and the rain when they should have been with her.

Well, perhaps she was worrying herself unreasonably. Her husband had ridden out alone to look over the cattle in South Paddock. John had gone to look at the sheep in East Paddock, and with him had gone Jimmy Partner. If anything had happened to John, there was Jimmy Partner to help him. And it might be the other way round. Still, for all that, what on earth was keeping them out so late, especially when it was raining and had been raining ever since two o’clock?

Tall and gaunt and grey was this Mary Gordon, a woman ill-fitted to counter the hardships of her early life, hardships suffered with the dumb patience of animals. Like an old picture, her face was covered with tiny lines. Her hair was thin and almost white, but her eyes were big and grey, wells of expression.