No longer hesitant, she walked across the open space to the out-buildings of which one was the men’s hut. In this there were two small rooms. In the outer room was a rough wood table, a form and several cases serving as chairs. On the table were weekly journals, a cribbage board, a hurricane lamp. Within the inner room stood two beds, one without a mattress, the other with a mattress and with blankets tossed in disorder on it. It was Jimmy Partner’s bed.

Mary’s mind seemed partitioned to-night and one part of it noted that the interior of this room smelled clean despite the fact that its tenant was an aboriginal. But then Jimmy Partner was an unusual aboriginal.

Again in the rain and hemmed by the menacing darkness, Mary walked to the wire gate in the low wire fence enclosing the whole of Meena homestead. She was unable to see it, but to her right stretched away the great bed of the lake that she had seen thrice filled with fifteen feet of water, giving life to countless water birds and heavy blackfish. Passing through the wire gateway, she began to follow a path winding away beneath the wide ribbon of box-trees bordering the lake’s shore, and now into the lamplight came wide-eyed rabbits to stare at her approach and vanish to either side. The rain was to give the rodents another lease of life.

Without a flicker the light went out; unexpectedly, because there was no wind. The night’s blackness struck her eyes like a velvety blow; and, her mind momentarily confused, she halted, the rain drops on the leaves and on the trees like the footsteps of gnomes.