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love her with all my heart. And, what’s more, I believe that she loves me in return.’
    Lathrop stared at Eyre like a madman. His hairy nostrils widened, and his whole body seemed to quake uncontrollably.
    â€˜Mr Lindsay—’ Eyre cautioned him. But Lathrop grew redder and redder, and his eyes popped, and with peculiarly stiff movements he raised his cane in his right hand, and began to advance on Eyre with dragging, paralytic steps; as if his entire nervous system had been congested by sheer rage.
    â€˜You dare to speak to me of love,’ he boiled. ‘You dare to come to my house on a bicycle and speak to me of love. By God, you young cur, I’ll take the skin off your back.’
    â€˜Mr Lindsay, please, you’re not yourself,’ Eyre told him, retreating towards the garden gate. This is not you, Mr Lindsay. Not the calm and ordered Mr Lindsay, of Waikerie Lodge.’
    He backed quickly out of the garden gate, and closed it.The two of them faced each other over the low white-painted palings; Eyre trying every possible expression of appeasement in his facial repertoire; Lathrop Lindsay gradually coming to the point of spontaneous combustion.
    â€˜Mr Lindsay, I don’t know what to say,’ said Eyre. ‘I imagined that I was a friend of the family. You gave me to
believe
that I was. I apologise if I mistook your charm and your courtesy for friendship. Perhaps you were just being nice to me for the sake of politeness. Please; it’s all my fault and I apologise. Can’t we start afresh?’
    Lathrop threw open the garden gate and began to stalk after Eyre along the dusty sidewalk.
    â€˜You, sir, are trying my temper to the very utmost,’ he trembled. ‘And if you are not astride that contraption of yours, that ridiculous pedalling-machine, and gone; if you are not gone by the time I reach you with this cane, then, God help you, I will have that skin of yours; and I will stretch out that skin of yours on my fence.’
    Eyre reached the hawthorn-tree and retrieved his bicycle. ‘You can consider me gone already,’ he said, tilting his nose up haughtily. ‘If I’m not welcome, then I’ll leave you. But a sadder man, let me tell you. And a disillusioned one, too. I used to respect you, Mr Lindsay, as a man of great social grace. I used to believe that you could charm the birds out of the trees.’
    â€˜By God,’ Lathrop threatened him; but at that moment there was a dull dusty flopping sound on the sidewalk next to him; and then another. He looked around in surprise, and saw that two currawong birds had fallen unconscious out of the hawthorn-tree, one after the other, and were lying in the dirt with their legs in the air.
    It was a common enough sight at this time of year, when the birds gorged themselves on dozens of fermented hawthorn berries and fell out of the trees in a drunken stupor. But the apt timing of their appearance led Lathrop and Eyre to stare at each other in utter surprise. Eyre couldn’t help himself: he burst out laughing.
    â€˜I told you, Mr Lindsay! And it looks as if you can still do it!’
    Lathrop let out an unearthly growling noise, and rushed towards Eyre with his cane lifted. Eyre pushed his bicycle four or five quick paces, then mounted the saddle and pedalled off along the street as rapidly as he could.
    â€˜I’ll thrash you, you blackguard!’ Lathrop screamed after him. ‘You stay away from Charlotte, do you hear me! You burrower!’
    Eyre raised his hat in mocking salute, and pedalled off between the rows of houses and hawthorn trees. Three Aborigine children in mission-school dresses stopped and stared at him as he balanced his way past them. He was whistling defiantly, a new popular song that had just found its way to Adelaide from London, ‘Country Ribbons’, and he sang the first verse of it as he turned right at the end of the road and bumped his way downhill on the