pale blue eyes, as if everything hadn't been as good to him as he thought it ought, considering his merit. He said his name was Evans, and he kept a store. He had been sixteen years in the country.
"And is it very hot in the summer?" said Harriet. "I suppose it is."
"Yes," he said, "it's very hot. I've known the days when I've had to lie down at two o'clock in the afternoon, and not been able to move. Overpowered, that's what it is, overpowered."
Harriet was suitably impressed, having tried heat in India.
"And do you think it takes one long to get used to this country?" she asked after a while.
"Well, I should say it takes about four or five years for your blood properly to thin down. You can't say you've begun, under two years."
"Four or five years!" re-echoed Harriet. But what she was really turning over in her mind was this phrase: "For your blood to thin down." To thin down! how queer! Lovat also heard the sentence, and realised that his blood took this thinning very badly, and still about four years of simmering ahead, apparently, if he stayed in this country. And when the blood had finished its thinning, what then? He looked at Mr Evans, with the sharp pale nose and the reddish hair and the injured look in his pale-blue eyes. Mr Evans seemed to find it sweet still to talk to people from the "old country." "You're from the old country?"—the inevitable question. The thinning down had left him looking as if he felt he lacked something. Yet he wouldn't go back to South Wales. Oh no, he wouldn't go back.
"The blood is thinner out here than in the old country." The Australians seemed to accept this as a scientific fact. Richard felt he didn't want his blood thinned down to the Australian constituency. Yet no doubt in the night, in his sleep, the metabolic change was taking place fast and furious.
It was raining a little in the late afternoon when Somers and Harriet got back to Coo-ee. With infinite relief she stepped across her own threshold.
"Ah!' she said, taking a long breath. "Thank God
