McKeith explained again. He had stopped a week, he said, at the last
outpost of Leichardt's land civilisation. The telegraph master there
lived in a hut made of sheets of corrugated zinc, raised on piles
twenty feet high and fortified against the Blacks. The entrance to it
was masked, spear-proof and had two men always on guard--there were
four men at the post. McKeith told a gruesome story of an assault by
the natives, and of rifles at work through gun-holes in the zinc tower.

Lady Bridget listened in silence. Now and then, she looked up at
McKeith, and, though her eyes gave forth ominous red-brown sparks, they
had in them something of the same unwilling fascination Joan Gildea had
noticed in the eyes of Colin McKeith.




CHAPTER 10



In the drawing room, before the men came in, Bridget talked to Joan
Gildea. They hadn't yet had, as Biddy reminded her, a regular
outpouring. The outpouring it should be stated, was always mostly on
Bridget's side.

'When did you start Socialism?' Mrs Gildea asked. 'That's something
new, isn't it?'

Biddy gave one of her slow smiles in which lips, eyes, brows, what