The Australian Read Free

to backing the winner in the Melbourne Cup race. Now she was so numb that only a trickle of excitement wound through her slender body. Perhaps even that would go away in time.
    Eventually they came to Providence, which looked very much the same, a small oasis of buildings among the rolling grasslands with the hazy ridges of the Great Dividing Range in the distance behind them and eternity facing them. John turned off the main bitumen road onto a graveled track that led past the Sterling Run on the way to Priss’s parents’ home. She tried not to look, but her eyes were drawn helplessly to the big sprawling house with its wide porches and colonial architecture. The driveway was lined with oleanders and royal poinciana and eucalyptus trees, which everyone called simply gum trees. Streams crisscrossed the land. They mostly dried up in the nine months preceding the Wet, which came near Christmas, but when the Wet thundered down on the plains, it was possible to be confined to the house for days until the rains stopped. Once she and her parents had had to stay with the Sterlings or be drowned out, and their small house had suffered enormous water damage.
    “The house looks as if it has just been painted,” she remarked, noticing its gleaming white surface.
    “It has,” he said curtly.
    She loved its long porches, where she had sat one spring with John’s mother and watched the men herd sheep down the long road on their way to the shearing sheds. That would be coming soon, she recalled, along with dipping and vetting and the muster of the cattle that supplemented John’s vast sheep herds.
    Beyond the house and its grove of eucalyptus trees were the fenced paddocks where the big Merino sheep grazed. They’d just been moved, she imagined, because the paddocks looked untouched. She noticed that the fences looked different.
    “There’s so little wire,” she remarked, frowning.
    “Electrified fencing,” John said. “Just one of the improvements we’re making. It’s less expensive than barbed wire or wooden fences.”
    “What if the power goes out?” she asked.
    “We have backup generators,” he returned. He glanced at her. “And men with shotguns...” he added with just a glimpse of his old dry humor.
    But she didn’t smile. The days were gone when she could do that with John. She only nodded.
    Soon they were at her parents’ house, deserted because Adam and Renée apparently hadn’t come home yet.
    “They’ll be back by dark, they said,” he told her.
    She nodded, staring at the lovely little bungalow, with its high gabled roof and narrow long front porch and green shutters at the windows. It was set inside a white picket fence, and Priss loved the very look of it, with the gum trees towering around it. Behind it was a stretch of paddock and then another grove of gum trees where a stream ran hidden, a magic little glade where she liked to watch koala bears feed on eucalyptus leaves and wait for lorikeets and other tropical birds to alight briefly on their flights.
    “It looks just the same,” she remarked softly.
    He got out and removed her bag from the trunk. She followed him onto the porch, and as she looked up her green eyes suddenly flashed with the memory of the last time they’d been alone together at this house.
    He searched her eyes slowly. “It was a long time ago,” he said quietly.
    “Yes,” she agreed, her face clouding. “But I haven’t forgotten. I’ll never forget. Or forgive,” she added coldly.
    He stuck his hands into his pockets, staring down at her from his formidable height. “No,” he said after a minute, and his voice was deep and slow. “I could hardly expect that, could I? It’s just as well that it’s all behind us. You and I were worlds apart even then.”
    Her knees felt rubbery, but she kept her poise. “Thank you for bringing me home,” she said formally.
    “I won’t say it was a pleasure,” he returned. “For my part, I wish you’d never come back.”
    He