The girl set up the low canvas table beside the running board. She busied herself with cut sandwiches and little cakes and crockery ware which her father never thought of bringing when he travelled by himself. Alone, his tucker box furnished with a tin pannikin and a butcher’s killing knife, bread and cold meat, tea and sugar, sufficed him. His wife, and, after her, his daughter, had failed to alter the habits of his youth when he served as a stockman, and later as a boss stockman.

“Ah! By the look of things we are going to do ourselves well to-day,” he said cheerfully.

“Of course,” she agreed emphatically, smiling up at him. “You would not expect me to be satisfied with a thick slice of bread and an equally thick slice of saltmeat, would you?”

“Hardly. What’s sauce for the old gander would be sandstone for the young goose. However, I am not sure that elegant living is good for a man. I have noticed lately a touch of indigestion. I never had that when I lived on damper and salt meat and jet-black tea.”

“Probably not, Dad; but you now have a touch of indigestion because you once lived on those things,” she countered swiftly. “Pour out my tea, please, before it becomes ink-black.”

Nettlefold was happy because his daughter was with him, and she was happy because he was so. Elizabeth was not the bush lover that her father was. The bush had “got” him in its alluring toils, but she had resisted it and, having resisted, escaped it. Paradoxically, she found no love for the bush, and yet hated the city.

The meal eaten, he gallantly lit her cigarette, and, with his pipe alight, began to pack away the luncheon things. She watchedhim, her eyes guarded with lowered lids, and told herself how fine was this simple, generous father of hers. It was understood that when she was out on the run with him she was his guest, staying at his country house, as he put it, and as his guest she was not to do any of the chares.