"Older, graver, harder ... and kinder, though you always had a genius for kindness, Potch.... But Maud----"
Potch turned his head from her. Sophie regarded his averted profile thoughtfully.
"I understand," she said.
Potch took her gaze steadily, but with troubled eyes.
"I wish ... somehow ... I needn't 've done what I did," he said.
"You'd have hated her, if you had gone back on the men--because of her."
"That's right," Potch agreed.
"And--you don't now?"
"No."
"I saw her--Maud--in New York ... before I came away," Sophie said slowly. "She was selling opal...."
"Did she show you the stones?"
"That's just what Michael asked me," Sophie said.
"Michael?" Potch's face clouded.
"She didn't show them to me, but I know who saw them all--he bought them--Mr. Armitage."
"The old man?"
"No, John."
After a minute Sophie said:
"Why are you so keen about those stones Maud had, Potch? Michael is, too.... Most of them were taken from the claims, I suppose--but was there anything more than that?"
"It's hard to say." Potch spoke reluctantly. "There's nothing more than a bit of guesswork in my mind ... and I suppose it's the same with Michael. I haven't said anything to Michael about it, and he hasn't to me, so it's better not to mention it."
"There's a good deal changed on the Ridge since I went away," Sophie remarked musingly.
"The new rush, and the school, the Bush Brothers' church, and Mrs.
Watty's veranda?"
"I don't mean that," Sophie said. "It's the people and things ... you, for instance, and Michael----"
"Michael?" Potch exclaimed. "He's wearing the same old clothes, the same old hat."
Sophie was too much in earnest to respond to the whimsey.
"He's different somehow ... I don't quite know how," she said. "There's a look about him--his eyes--a disappointed look, Potch.... It hurt him when I went away, I know. But now--it's not that...."
As Potch did not reply, Sophie's eyes questioned him earnestly.
"Has anything happened," she asked, "to make Michael look like that?"
"I ... don't know," Potch replied.
Answered by the slow and doubtful tone of his denial, Sophie exclaimed:
"There is something, Potch! I don't want to know what it is if you can't tell me. I'm only worried about Michael.... I'd always thought he had the secret of that inside peace, and now he looks----Oh, I can't bear to see him look as he does.... And he seems to have lost interest in things--the life here--everything."
"Yes," Potch admitted.
"Only tell me," Sophie urged, "is this that's bothering Michael likely to clear, and has it been hanging over him for long?"
Potch was silent so long that she wondered whether he was going to answer the question. Then he said slowly:
"I ... don't know. I really don't know anything, Sophie. I happened to find out--by accident--that Michael's pretty worried about something. I don't rightly know what, or why. That's all."
The even pace of those days gave Sophie the quiet mind she had come to the Ridge for. There was healing for her in the fragrant air, the sunshiny days, the blue-dark nights, with their unclouded, starry skies.
She went into the shed one morning and threw the bags from the cutting-wheel which had been her mother's, cleared and cleaned up the room, rearranged the boxes, put out her working gear, and cut and polished one or two stones which were lying on a saucer beside the wheel, to discover whether her hand had still its old deftness. Michael was delighted with the work she showed him in the evening, and gave her several small stones to face and polish for him.
Every day then Sophie worked at her wheel for a while. George and Watty, Bill Grant and the Crosses brought stuff for her to cut and polish, and in a little while her life was going in the even way it had done before she left the Ridge, but it was a long time before Sophie went about as she used to. After a while, however, she got into the way of walking over to see Maggie Grant or Martha M'Cready in the afternoon, occasionally; but she never talked to them of her life away from the Ridge; they never spoke of it to her.
Only one thing had disturbed her slightly--seeing Arthur Henty one evening as she and Martha were coming from the Three Mile.
He had come towards them, with a couple of stockmen, driving a mob of cattle. Dust rose at the heels of the cattle and horses; the cattle moved slowly; and the sun was setting in the faces of the men behind the cattle. Sophie did not know who they were until a man on a chestnut horse stared at her. His face was almost hidden by his beard; but after the first glance she recognised Arthur Henty. They passed as people do in a dream, Sophie and Martha back from the road, the men riding off the cattle, Arthur with the stockmen and cattle which a cloud of dust enveloped immediately. The dark trees by the roadside swayed, dipped in the gold of the sunset, when they had passed. The image of Arthur Henty riding like that in the dust behind the cattle, his face gilded by the light of the setting sun, came to Sophie again and again. She was a little disturbed by it; but it was only natural that she should be, she thought. She had not seen Arthur since the night of the ball, and so much had happened to both their lives since then.
She saw him once or twice in the township afterwards. He had stared at her; Sophie had bowed and smiled, but they had not spoken. Later, she had seen him lounging on the veranda at Newton's, or hanging his bridle over the pegs outside Ezra Smith's billiard saloon, and neither her brain nor pulse had quickened at the sight of him. She was pleased and reassured. She did not think of him after that, and went on her way quietly, happily, more deeply content in her life with Michael and Potch.
As her natural vigour returned, she grew to a fuller appreciation of that life; health and a normal poise of body and soul brought the faint light of happiness to her eyes. Michael heard her laughing as she teased Paul sometimes, and Potch thrilled to the rippled cadenza of Sophie's laughter.
"It's good to hear that again," Michael said to him one day, hearing it fly from Rouminof's hut.
Potch's glance, as his head moved in assent, was eloquent beyond words.
Sophie had a sensation of hunger satisfied in the life she was leading.
Some indefinable hunger of her soul was satisfied by breathing the pure, calm air of the Ridge again, and by feeling her life was going the way the lives of other women on the Ridge were going. She expected her life would go on like this, days and years fall behind her unnoticed; that she and Potch would work together, have children, be splendid friends always, live out their days in the simple, sturdy fashion of Ridge folk, and grow old together.
CHAPTER IX
Tenders had been called for, to clear the course for the annual race meeting. A notice posted on the old, wild cherry tree in the road opposite Newton's, brought men and boys from every rush on Fallen Star to Ezra Smith's billiard-room on the night appointed; and Ezra, constituted foreman by the meeting, detailed parties to clear and roll the track.
A paddock at the back of the town, with several tall coolebahs at one side, was known as the race-course. A table placed a little out from the trees served for a judge's box; and because the station folk usually drew up their buggies and picnicked there, the shade of the coolebahs was called the grand-stand. Farther along a saddling-paddock had been fenced off, and in it, on race-days, were collected a miscellaneous muster of the show horses of the district--rough-haired nags, piebald and skewbald; rusty, dusty, big-boned old racers with famous reputations; wild-eyed, unbroken youngsters, green from the plains; Warria chestnuts, graceful as greyhounds, with quivering, scarlet nostrils; and the nuggety, deep-chested offspring of the Langi-Eumina stallion Black Harry.
People came from far and near for the races, and for the ball which was held the same evening in the big, iron-roofed shed opposite Newton's.