So, for her own purposes, she made their drive half as long again as it need have been.  And was so friendly, so free, so intimate!—­leading that poor innocent to the belief that his great rival was already virtually out of his way.  He was an unsophisticated sailor-lad, who, with that rival’s help, had reached a certain stage and crisis—­ another one—­of his man’s life; and—­let us be honest in our diagnosis—­the bubbles of Mr Thornycroft’s fine champagne still ran in his blood and brightened his brain, lifting him above the prosaic ground-level where a craven timidity would have smothered him.  Not touching the balance of his wits, be it understood; just heartening him—­no more.

Twice and thrice she branched off from the road to show him something that could well have waited for another day.  She was imprudent enough to introduce him to so sentimental a spot as the family cemetery—­ established at a time when there were only Dalzells and Pennycuicks to feed it.  “Their shepherds were killed by the blacks,” said Deb, as she pushed the ponies up to the wall, and he rose in the carriage to look over the top, “and they buried them here, marking the place with a pile of stones.  There were other deaths, and they enclosed the piece of land.  Then a brother of Mr Dalzell’s, and a girl; and Mr Dalzell himself wished to be put here, beside his brother.  Not his wife, she wouldn’t; she lies in the Melbourne cemetery.  Then some of our babies, then mother.  She was the last.  I don’t suppose there will be any more now.  The State will insist on taking charge of us.”

Real English churchyard elms crowded about the wall and blightingly overshadowed the lonely group of graves.  English ivy, instead of neatly clothing the wall, as it had been meant to do, straggled wildly over the part of the enclosure which had once been a garden around them.  Out of it, like sea-stripped wrecks, dead sticks of rose-bushes poked up, and ragged things that had gone to seed.  The turf was parched away, like the grass of the surrounding paddocks; the mounds were cracked; the head-stones—­several of them ornate and costly—­stained with the drip from the trees and birds, and some distinctly out of the perpendicular.

“It ought not to look like this,” Deb apologised for it.  “It ought to have been seen to.  We used to come often, and bring water from the dam.  But one forgets as time goes on; one doesn’t think—­or care.  Poor dead people!  How out of it they are!  And we shall be the same some day—­neglected and abandoned, just like this.”

“Don’t!” muttered Guthrie Carey, shivering.  The ghost of his sweet Lily seemed to reproach him with Deb’s voice.  But the ghost-woman fifteen months old had no chance with the glowing live woman born into his life but yesterday; and no blame to him either, and no wrong to the dead, if one can look at the thing dispassionately and with an unbiased mind.

“Let us go and see the dam,” Deb cheered him, as she turned the ponies’ heads.  “You haven’t seen our big dam, have you?  Everybody that comes to Redford must see that, or father will want to know the reason why.  ‘Pennycuick’s Folly’ some people call it, because he spent so much money on it; but father is not one to spoil the ship for a pen’orth of paint.  He likes to do things thoroughly.  So do I.”