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the bay, but preluded nothing. In the thin forest behind him, one insect voice burred the edges of afternoon and, without turning to the hillside, Halloran could see, could hear in the noise, the dearth and drought and straggled bark.
    As people will when they’re embarrassed, he found himself speaking aloud, though covertly. He was thinking, And what if Ann doesn ’ t come back out to me this afternoon? ‘We had hoped for a more generous spring,’ he found himself saying. He spoke in a low throatiness in which he had first heard the ironic sentence spoken by His Excellency on the parade-ground ten weeks before.
    â€˜We had hoped for a more generous spring.’
    But a disappointing spring had given way to the malign summer in which Halloran, aware of his sweat,no longer sanguine, waited now. December had come rampaging amongst the carnations along Government Road, had trampled on the last blooming of expatriate stocks. It had crushed the title Advent ,which the two parsons tried to lay upon its back, until every hint of juice and fruitfulness had been ground out. In dutiful vegetable gardens, the leaves of carrots and turnips had tettered and split, shot full of holes by antipodean summer. The grain had already rusted hard beside the little creek called Collett’s Brook; and there would be no harvest at Government Farm, where muddied stooks of young corn stood like the camp wreckage of a beaten army.
    At the time of his parade-ground speech, the Governor had devoted fifteen minutes to the sentiment that, although nothing but the worm of death seemed to flourish in this obdurate land, it was the duty of those who served the King not to accept things by their seeming, but to out-stubborn the wayward earth. Yet the officers, their regimentals fibrous from three summers’ sweat, had squinted at the sky with flat hatred. There was very little assent in their hearts.
    And Halloran felt this hatred too, and he was somewhat short of assent. Yet he knew that this was a summer of unequalled promise. He had begun it with such a welter of emotion that, after the torpor of barrack life at Chatham and the dumb pain of shipboard and colonial service, he felt reborn. This was partly because he had no doubt that he was living in a legend, becausehe underwent all the fervours set down in legends and in poetry. It was as if he actually felt, above himself and Ann, the mercy of a story-teller. However, a French sage asked once, ‘How many men would never have loved, if they had never heard of love?’ Halloran began to suspect that he was basking in the emotions of other men, and not only that, the emotions of other men as tempered by art and decency, metre and rhyme. By this time, Ann had become the substance of his life.
    â€˜Mrs Blythe says you’re to take good care of me and remember your obligations.’
    She had come into the garden without his hearing. She stood business-like against the skeletal tracery of her master’s sick vines. Her dress underlined her thinness; it was abnormally high-waisted and draped all but the toes of Mrs Blythe’s cast-off shoes. The dirty green fabric was so very thick that it seemed to be supported by its own hem. It wrapped her hunger round plentifully, to give her the look of one of those Christ-child statues that are enveloped in vast copes and are pink and lost in their kingship. Already, Ann had her hat on, one of those small top-hats which ladies wear to riding; and once more, Mrs Blythe, who had come thirteen thousand miles to stay indoors, had given it to her.
    She frowned. But the dull petulance of the kitchen had drained out of her already. Halloran saw this, with gratitude. The next instant, the oblique sun fetched him a clout on the side of the neck. His mouth flew open fora second or two in the terror of fainting. But he didn’t fall down. In the freezing sweat of sunstroke, he saw how the dark-green of her dress had imposed itself on her. He