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In the morning Ignez galloped over to see Sylvia and settled the matter of a horse for pleasure. Her own hack, Deerfoot, a ladylike waler, would go in harness. Ignez responded to the Mazeres' social needs as eagerly as if they were her own. She was spontaneous and sympathetic, as full of energy as generosity, and always felt that problems were to be solved by more effort on her part, unaware that she was recklessly pouring out unusual personal gifts in the process. She added the Mazeres' preoccupations to her duties at Deep Creek, and her musical studies and practice were squeezed into any cranny of time, a procedure fatal to serious voice or piano culture, but no one there understood this.

Immediately following dinner on Saturday the young people set off to the football match. The glittering sunshine could not warm the air driven across the high tableland by the Antarctic's bellows to sting young cheeks to brighter hue and furrow the long coat of the horse. Magpies and rosellas rose before them from the arid paddocks dotted with stumps like grave-stones or ringbarked trees that stood naked and gibbet-like. The underbrush scraped the wheels as they travelled, laughing and chattering, undepressed by the bad season. A final set of sliprails let them into the football ground upon a stock reserve at Kaligda. Play had already started on a cleared space surrounded by a dense wall of briers. The boys protected the horse with the rug and approaching the game, while the girls sought acquaintances in the sheltered bays among the briers.

Tot and Elsie Norton were stylish girls and warmly welcomed the Mazeres, who were newcomers to these gatherings because the mesdames Mazere and Healey were still inclined to be aloof, remembering their up-country status. The Norton place was in the direction of Arthur Masters's. Tot and Elsie were saddled with another near neighbour, Bridgit Finnegan. The Norton horses were too poor for pleasure and one had been borrowed from old Finnegan, a more thrifty husbandman. He raged about this waste of horseflesh, but Mick, his son, as well as Bridgit, was against him so he was defeated.

Wyndham Norton, known as Wynd for short, came to greet the new arrivals as soon as the game permitted, and looked on Sylvia with a delight that was marked by Bridgit, whose heart was Wynd's for keeps. Wynd played cricket and football in a way that made him popular with the youths, danced and sang equally acceptably to the girls, and was as cheerful and normal a young man as could be found from Oswald's Ridges to Crookwell. He looked well in his jersey, and when among the girls his eyes were as full of admiration as his mouth of compliments. He did not lack a pleasant word for Bridgit, a roomy clodhopper with unmanageable hands and feet, though her pleased reception of any word of his was warning him of danger. A whistle recalled him to the game. His place with the visitors was taken by Mick Finnegan, Bridgit's brother, who was on the field as a spare. He knew Blanche, and was introduced to Sylvia and Ignez. He was a reader of standard works on agriculture and history, and a natural desire to discuss his knowledge and a delight in literary language made him seem pedantic among those who read nothing but the local paper. They took revenge for their own inferiority by nicknaming him "the Professor". Sylvia's beauty dazzled him. Under its spell he found himself in conversation with Ignez. Sylvia had remarked on the dreadful appearance of the country and Ignez said that people should conserve fodder.

"You're right, Miss Milford," agreed Finnegan. "Australians need to learn how to farm. The pig-rooting and cockatoo-scratching stage is past." He waved a commodious hand to indicate the ragged watershed. "It's time to practise more concentrative and economic methods than those of the careless days. Once, if the wheat was a failure the settler put in potatoes. If grubs ate these, he could turn to a few cows; when drought dried up the dairying there were sheep. Stumps in the middle of the furrows or acres wasted in headlands and wash-aways were of no account."

"In the wet seasons they squeak about footrot and fluke; in the dry ones they squeak about everything dying of drought. My uncle says there ought to be a great reservoir in the mountains that would let the water gravitate all over the lower country, but no one listens to him."

No one listened to Mr Finnegan and Miss Milford except with a mild sense of ridicule. Mick himself had more hankering for Sylvia's beauty as an audience than for Ignez's intelligence. The piercing wind was a penalty to the onlookers. Sylvia suggested a walk as relief and they ascended Baby Mountain. Appropriately named, it rose up alone from little ridges. Its crest, easily attained, commanded a fine view. In the foreground a few steel-grey roofs peeped above jungles of briers red with berries; a school-house and a church topped a middle ridge; the horizon was a wide circle of blue hills with Lake George as a jewel in the centre. The drought was emptying the lake and reviving anecdotes of early days when it had not existed at all.

"Isn't it lovely! I wish I could paint!" exclaimed Ignez.

"It's so cold it's painting my nose as blue as itself," said Sylvia. Everyone laughed and watched her with more interest than the scenery as she snuggled into her fur collar and lifted her skirts from the snagging logs and sticks of the thickly fallen timber.

As they neared the football field again, Sylvia whispered to Blanche, "He's come." Her colour heightened and she turned with stressed attention to Finnegan.

"The aristocracy seems to have descended upon us," he observed with reference to a man leaning over the split-rail fence watching the game and smoking an unusual pipe. Not yet dismounted was a younger man on a flighty racing filly with a heavy rug strapped to the pommel to protect her clipped body. "The celebrated Malcolm Oswald of Cooee."

"What's he celebrated for?" inquired Ignez.

"He rides half-broken colts over wire fences, and that, Miss Milford, makes him much more celebrated than if he were the author of an encyclopaedia on agriculture."

"It's a pity that professors are often so dull while those that kill time at the races generally look more like real men."

"Oswald has a weakness for pretty faces. You'll always see one of his horses tied outside a house where there's a pretty girl."

"Is it the same girl or a succession?"

"He likes them in rotation," continued Finnegan, delighted to say this before Elsie Norton. He watched her face, but her expression was studiously detached. An Oswald thoroughbred was so often hitched outside Norton's that the gossips were saying, "Elsie might catch him yet if she watches herself."

Oswald remained leaning over the fence with one or two men, apparently engrossed in the play, while Sylvia kept her face in another direction. When at length she turned towards him with a scarcely perceptible bow, he pocketed his pipe with an alacrity at variance with his manner, and approached in the stiff gait of one racked by rough riding.

"Well, Miss Mazere, you got home safely, I see," he remarked, with a pleasant twinkle in his eyes.

"You are old acquaintances," said Elsie Norton. "You never mentioned it, Mr Oswald."

"Hadn't the pleasure of seeing you since."

Sylvia added amiably, "I met Mr Oswald on the train, and found him a good porter."

"Thank you. I'm hoping for further engagements." Oswald bowed mockingly. He could make fewer words go farther than any man to whom he said goodday.

"Doesn't he beat Gallagher, like a moth to a candle to every new pretty face!" Finnegan did not advance his own cause by this aside to Elsie. She kept her attention on the Mazere party, startled by the advent of a new star in Oswald's firmament.

"Hullo! Hullo!" cried Wynd Norton, approaching with a ball under his arm. "Who did you bring with you?"

"Hullo, Wynd! Gave 'em a good licking," responded Oswald. "I brought my young cousin from Monaro." The lad drew near with the men with whom he had been left in the first place. "My cousin, Malcolm Timson."

Ignez greeted him as a Monaro acquaintance, and interest took a fresh focus as the youth entered the circle. He, too, was in corduroy breeks and leggings and long spurs; he, too, was a superb horseman, but years had not yet stiffened his action; he was lithe and quick in his movements.

Elsie, with attention concentrated on Oswald and Sylvia, noted happily that Sylvia's glances had sweet wonder for the new arrival. Sylvia was beholding a young man who stood six feet one in his socks and was proudly proportioned from his well-cut head to his long sunburnt hands with the filbert nails. His black hair showed a crisp white parting as he raised his hat. His brows were level and delicate, his nose well-formed and of dignified cast. His lips were firm and tranquil and smudged by a small moustache, hastening to be adult and in the fashion up the country, where entirely shaven faces were the exception.

The old hands of Monaro and Bool Bool maintained that young Malcolm Timson was the spit of his great-uncle, Bert Poole of Curradoobidgee, with an added merriment of manner and a kink in his hair contributed by his grandfather, Malcolm M'Eachern, son of the old original of Gowandale.

The locals had beaten their guests by six goals to four. Everyone was in haste to get away, the afternoon was raw, and some spectators had twenty miles to go. Masters's men made off to the milking, leaving Arthur free for the evening.

"Well, you gave 'em a great walloping," said Oswald as Masters came up, wiping the perspiration from his face.

Arthur and Wynd were the district champions, but Wynd was off his game because of a sprained wrist earned in a previous contest, and Masters had been compelled to unusual exertion in his forward play. He looked towards Ignez for approval of his performance.

"You were a regular hummer," she conceded.

Finnegan asked Sylvia her opinion of the play.

"You mean that little scuffle at the end of the flat while we went for a walk?"

Wynd met the provocation of her glance with hearty laughter.

"You'd better put on your coat, the wind is like a knife, and you're so hot," said Blanche to Arthur.

"You're like a mother," he responded, without heeding her advice. Blanche was not attempting motherliness and felt disappointed as she invited Wynd and Arthur to tea. Masters accepted readily. "I have Tarpot with me," he remarked for Blanche alone. That was better.

Wynd said he was with the Finnegans, so Sylvia turned charmingly to Bridgit. "Won't you come too? I've hardly had a word with you, and I'm sure your brother hasn't finished his debate with Miss Milford."

Blanche was dubious about the Finnegans. Mazere referred to the old man as a God-forsaken old bogtrotter as bigoted as a bull, but Miss Finnegan accepted effusively. By lending the Norton's a horse—about which Da had made such an unholy fuss—she felt she was to ascend socially.

Arthur and Wynd then escorted the visiting team to the pub about half a mile away to treat them to a nip, politely called refreshments, before their bracing homeward drive while they heard the story of the Wellington boot left by the Hall gang of bushrangers one day in the sixties when they shot the township constable and scribbled the first line of a legend on the little settlement's blank slate. A number of other young men remained with the girls. They fed the fire and stood round it chattering and dodging the gusts of smoke.

Sylvia invited Oswald and his namesake for the evening. Ignez was immediately friendly with Malcolm the younger, so like his famous uncle, Bert Poole, who had married her dearest friend Milly Saunders. Ignez further claimed him as almost a cousin because her uncle, Harry Milford, had married a Miss Labosseer, and that Miss Labosseer's two uncles each had married a great-aunt of Malcolm. Sylvia insisted that she had closer connection and began to trace it.

"Here come Wynd and Arthur; now we can go home, and mother and father can straighten it out. Who married this and who was grandfather of what is all that old people think about," said Dick.

"In any case we're near enough to know our Christian names," drawled Oswald. He had not yet been to Lagoon Valley but was sure of a welcome. The cockies were prouder than stray members of the big land-holding cliques; they did not risk social slights by getting in the way of richer men's second-grade hospitality, though the said stray members accepted the cockies' best complacently.

The Nortons were pleased to go to Lagoon Valley, also for the first time, though embarrassed by the Finnegans. Oswald suggested that Dick could try his colt, and Dick decamped at once leaving his seat in the buggy beside Sylvia. This suggested other changes, but none that were satisfactory to Bridgit, Elsie, or Blanche.

Mrs Mazere, with the aid of Aubrey and Philippa, had the meal ready. Masters shifted an extra table and chairs; Sylvia took charge of the women guests. Wynd helped the boys with the horses. To have Arthur thus active domestically made Blanche happy.

"So you and the Professor had a good time," he teased Ignez.

"He has something in his head at all events," she replied.

"He'll never be happy till he gets Elsie Norton."

"And Elsie makes fun of him," added Blanche.

"That's a common symptom," interposed Mrs Mazere. "I couldn't count all the girls I've heard ridiculing their future husbands."

"So you reckon it's a good symptom. Do you ever ridicule me?" Arthur demanded of Ignez, with a broad grin. Blanche felt this question was really for herself, but addressed to the younger girl as a subterfuge.

Mrs Mazere and Blanche were industrious providers and the table was well laden in spite of the lean harvest. Mrs Mazere was animated, her pains forgotten. To disperse hospitality had likewise made a pleasant change in Mazere's worry about the drought. Aubrey was rewarded for his home-staying by a seat beside Sylvia to the displacement of an older admirer and the lively delight of the child. Youthful merriment was as robust as the appetites sharpened by exercise in the keen wind.

While Blanche held the company up to know if they took milk and sugar in their tea, Sylvia reopened the matter of Timson's relationship. Mazere settled it.

"Your grandmother was Ada Poole," he began to Timson. "That makes old Boko Poole of Curradoobidgee your great-grandfather. Your grandmother had two sisters, Charlotte and Louisa, who were married to two sons of the original Mazere of Three Rivers. Those two Mazeres were uncles of Mrs Mazere and me, as we are cousins."

"It dizzies me," murmured Elsie Norton, who was sitting on Mazere's right.

"It's not close enough for me to get into young Timson's will," guffawed Mazere.

Oswald contended that he came in higher up the tree, being the son of Flora M'Eachern, but his claims were dismissed with laughter because his aunt, Jessie M'Eachern, had thrown Great-uncle Hugh Mazere over to remain an old maid.

"It doesn't bring you very near to the Mazeres," said Oswald's host, "but it brings you near enough to have another cup of tea and another slice of beef. It's not very fat, but that can't be helped these days."

"Thanks, on the strength of the family connection." Oswald's plate and cup were refilled.

Talk pursued the difficulty of finding a beast fit to kill, until it was put on the road of politics by Michael Finnegan. The federation of the colonies into a commonwealth or dominion was the liveliest question of the hour. Ignez said that the matter should be postponed until women could vote upon it.

"Are you going to vote for woman suffrage?" she demanded of Finnegan.

"I am not," he promptly replied. "It's a woman's glory to serve. As soon as women begin to take the places of men a nation is doomed."

"Men don't flute like that when women are labouring in the cowyards." Bridgit was more at home in a cowyard than in a drawing-room, so Wynd suppressed his inward bubbling, and Mazere tried to change the subject.

"It's not in trifling physical labour that the decadence is dangerous, but in women trying to ape men's minds," continued Mr Finnegan, but Mrs Mazere pressed him to a further helping of pudding, and Blanche tried to pour him a fourth cup of tea, and while he was defending himself from them Ignez planted what Wynd called a sollicker.

"You'd think that men were afflicted with whiskers on their brains as well as on their faces, the way you talk. There's no sex in sheer intellect."

Arthur winked at Ignez, which comforted her. Elsie Norton laughed in silvery affectation, and Wynd inquired of Allan the difference between a dead bee and a sick lion. In the drawing-room later the Professor and Ignez had to take refuge in each other's intelligence because one did not sing and the other was ruled out as a pianist in favour of Tottie Norton and Sylvia, whose repertoires were more popular.

Many an animal was shivering in its final torture in the demolishing winds over the dry frosty tracts, but their suffering did not penetrate to the comfort of the piled log fires in drawing-room, dining-room, and kitchen, where the company was divided for certain games. Loud were the songs and laughter. "The Deathless Army", "The Midshipmite", "Sailing", "They All Love Jack", "Anchored", and a dozen other current ballads were rendered by Oswald, Dick, and Wynd. The Misses Norton and Mazere contributed "Whispering Hope", "The Valley by the Sea", and "The Maid of the Mill". Sylvia aroused excessive delight with "The Miller and the Maid", "Barney O'Hea", "Annie Laurie", and "Scenes that are Brightest". "Father O'Flynn", "Off to Philadelphia", "The Rhine Wine", etc. etc. were bawled as choruses. Then Sylvia, Dick and Masters insisted that Ignez should sing "The Carnival" and "Daddy" in her big unsteady young contralto, which the unknowing were inclined to ridicule. She added another song about a last waltz, a rose that was dead and a love that was fled, which filled the amorous with yearning, and made her elderly and unmusical hosts wonder why a lively girl who knew nothing of the troubles of life should choose such dismal wash.

High spirits bubbled during a lavish supper at eleven o'clock, after which the visitors turned out in the frost. All were pressed to stay the night, but refused with effusive thanks and ardent hopes of early future meetings.

Aubrey and Philippa had been asleep for some time. The elders left the fire to the young people, who held the usual post-mortem on their guests.

"That great walloping Bridgit never said a word," giggled Allan.

"That silly old Mick grabbed her share of the conversation. He needs a good sneeze to clear his head. All the same he's going to lend me a book of poetry," commented Dick.

"I've taken a fancy to Bridgit," announced Sylvia.

"She's not such a twicer as Tottie Norton," conceded Dick. "Tottie agrees with everyone, and that can't work out right."

"When Wynd is singing Bridgit's lips keep moving with the words." Ignez's tone was thoughtful.

"She'd just suit him," decided Blanche. "She would paddle in the cowyard while Wynd ran about and enjoyed himself."

"What did you think of the Malcolms?" inquired Sylvia, coming to her special interest.

"I wish I had their horses," said Dick.

"Me too," agreed Allan. "That filly's a clinker—too much toe for anything about here. I hope they get spoony on Sylvia, then we can ride their mokes."

"I'm ashamed of you, Allan," came from Sylvia in laughing rebuke, free from sting.

"When I grow up," announced Allan, "I'm dead certain I'll never get spoony on the girls. The men think the girls are dead shook on them, and all the time the girls are only poking borak."

"The way that Tottie does her hair makes it look a terrible lot," began Blanche.

Mazere père shouted from his room, "Get to bed! Get to bed!" The boys obeyed, leaving the girls to whisper their final dissections.

"Everyone says Malcolm Oswald is smitten on Elsie Norton," pursued Blanche.

Sylvia yawned. She was continually meeting men whom rumour credited to this and to that girl, but they always looked at her as Malcolm Oswald had done at their first encounter and connived at a second meeting as soon as possible. In any case she was no longer interested in the elder Malcolm.

"Dear me, I thought it was Bert Poole, when that young Timson came in tonight," remarked Mrs Mazere, as she and her husband began their summary of the evening. "What is the old yarn about the Timsons and Healeys?"

"Old Healey, the original man-eater of Little River, was said to have bought his wife from old Logan the Bushranger. Nellie Logan, supposed to be half-sister of Larry Healey's father, married Malcolm M'Eachern. Larry Healey's father and this young Timson's mother are first cousins, and Logan the bushranger is this boy's great-grandfather."

"If that's his pedigree he's not worth running after."

"Hoh! If you went into it, where would you find a better? A few out of any family may be good flowery potatoes. Most of the others have green frostbite."

"The old M'Eacherns hunted the son when he married Nellie Logan."

"But here's this young fellow riding about with his cousin. Any of the geebungs will jump at him."

"Old Logan the bushranger!"

"What are the aristocracy of England but the descendants of robbers, and many of them bastards at that, if you read history?"

"Well, we don't come from people like that." Mrs Mazere's tone was self-satisfied.

"And where is Dick today compared with young Timson? What good is the Mazere breed if it can't get ahead of the other fellow? When Timson comes to settle down you'll see it won't be with any of the cockies' daughters of Oswald's Ridges. The very name means Oswald's leavings when the old original squatted on his early holding. That Norton piece thinks she'll catch Oswald. He finds it a good place to loaf."

"Arthur Masters might be the best of the lot."

"There's not a man among them fit to wipe Masters's boots."

"He has lent Blanche his buggy horse."

"Blanche is the wrong colour. He thinks no more of her than he does of the old bogtrotter's daughter, and she has her eye on young Norton."

"When he gets this city billet he's after he won't want to be saddled with a lump like Bridgit."

"More likely when he's had his twopenny-halfpenny job a year or two he'll be glad to limp home to Bridgit—with a good slice of farm saved by the old potato, griping to put penny to penny. All these young fellows'll find that they're only fit for unskilled labour in the city, the same as in the country, and many a time they'll wish they were riding about Oswald's Ridges grinning at the girls."

"Mr Oswald seems a pleasant man," was all that Mrs Mazere could oppose to this.

"Is it likely he wouldn't be when he comes to loaf with the girls and have a feed? The difference between him and Masters is that Masters does his share of work like a man, and Oswald pays a man to do his while he leans over the fences at cricket matches, or sits on old Norton's sofa while his horse is tied outside."

"I'm sure I wish I had someone to do my work for me."

"Hoh! That's not the point."

"It's a plain point to me," retorted Mrs Mazere.

Her husband retreated by way of a final shout to the young people, "Get to bed! Get to bed!"

Oswald let Wynd escape from Bridgit on the colt while he took the back seat in the buggy beside Elsie. With three against him Michael was powerless to prevent this arrangement. Wynd rode with the younger Malcolm and Masters near enough to the vehicle for chatter. Oswald's place, named Cooee, was many miles from Norton's, so both Malcolms were persuaded to turn in with the Nortons. Tomorrow was good old Sunday, free from major works, so Masters and the Finnegans also yielded to more tea and talk before going home, and it was very late or early before the Norton household was in bed and Elsie free to sort her thoughts.

Tottie had fallen asleep contentedly, sure that Arthur had no thought of Blanche Mazere. She did not detect a rival in one so young as Ignez, a girl with outrageous ideas that would ensure the disapproval of men. Elsie's own senses corroborated the evidence of Masters's, Wynd's, and Finnegan's frank admiration of the new beauty. It had seemed as if something already existed between Sylvia and Oswald. Then straightway Oswald had taken his young cousin to Lagoon Valley; but now both men were under her own roof and Oswald had reassumed possession of her in the buggy. Elsie's early panic subsided. She seated herself before the old mirror which leant against the low slab wall amid a clutter of toilet mats, pincushions, and other fancy work that guaranteed the correct femininity of the fingers responsible. The glass reflected one of the prettiest girls of its acquaintance. The mouth and chin were softly moulded, the hair nearly golden, the eyes a golden brown. The thought obtruded that Sylvia Mazere's eyes were blue, her hair a richer tint and more plentiful, and that in addition to exquisite lines of brow and nose there was in the poise of Sylvia's head that indefinable something which makes a more appealing beauty than even perfect chiselling. Elsie wondered if she too had that something extra or was she merely pretty. How could one make sure? She turned the thought over and over, oblivious of the winds from the unlimited south as they swept the bleak tablelands and racketed round the little white-washed wooden houses of the settlers.