thing fascinating about seeing a little trickle of water grow and grow till it could carry an ocean-going ship. She loved the places that rivers came from, the mangrove swamps they cut across, the lagoons they sneaked out of, the gullies they watered.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming along the track. Before she could move a man slipped out of the bush, and in the dusk she saw his slight boyish figure above her and his white face framed in his soft black hair.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said quickly and resentfully, not seeing who it was, and thinking he had surprised a pair of lovers. Before she could speak he turned and was gone.
Valerie could not bring her mind back to the river and the birds. She began to think of Dane Barrington.
She was fifteen when she had first read an article by him in the Sydney Bulletin. That was ten years ago and since that time he had become the finest critical writer, and one of the best writers of stories and verse in the colonies, and was generally acknowledged to be the best all-round journalist in Australasia. He was an Australian, born in Sydney, and even before he achieved a reputation as a writer he had achieved one on his looks and fascination. Almost every well-known Sydney artist had painted him or drawn him. A black and white drawing of his head by Norman Lindsay had been the feature of one winter’s exhibition, and had been reproduced in papers and magazines. As a girl of seventeen Valerie had come across a print of it and had cut it out and pasted it in a little book with heads of Byron and Shelley, and Keats and Napoleon and Caesar, and other dramatic heroes of her adolescent passions. She still had that little book.
