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has kicked through.”
    “Oh,” I said. “I expect the land is poor,” I added wisely. “The feed isn’t very good at home either. The crofters can only run very few sheep over the hills, sometimes no more than two to the acre.”
    Mr . Fraser’s laughter sounded like the crack of a rifle. “I run a sheep to the square mile, or thereabouts!” he said.
    Then where did he get his money from ? Every crofter that I knew relied heavily on his few sheep to subsidise his living.
    “Perhaps tin makes a lot of money?” I hazarded, aware that I was on the point of asking a most personal question about the size of his income.
    “You’re out there! The mining may have put Western Australia on the map, but it’s the wool that keeps me there. My last wool cheque was more than twenty thousand dollars.”
    It sounded a great deal of money. I frankly did not believe him. “From a few sheep?” I chided him.
    He sighed. He must have thought me very stupid . “I reckon my station is as big as a couple of Scottish counties,” he said.
    My eyes grew as big as saucers. “Is—is Australia very big?” I asked nervously.
    “You can’t believe it,” he assured me. “You have to see it for yourself! Nothing is what you expect. Take the Murchison, There’s the Big Bell Mine, not a century old, but already half abandoned. And Kalgoorlie, where the gold is. And all of it on some of the oldest rocks in the world!”
    “And are there really kangaroos?” I put in eagerly.
    “Too right, there are!”
    I was reduced to silence at the thought. A great gladness of the spirit rose within me and I was longing to be quit of London to see this place for myself. Four years no longer seemed like a prison sentence. I was convinced that life was beginning for me now, despite having to be married to Mr. Fraser.
    “Mr. Fraser, do you like London?” I asked him cautiously.
    “In its way,” he grunted. “I like a bit of space myself.”
    I sighed happily, sure now that the Murchison and I would get along very nicely. “So do I!” I said.
    There was a new sympathy between us after that conversation. Mr. Fraser went round to Australia House to get them to help him to hasten the Passport Office for my passport and it was with us the following morning. It was very new, a shiny navy blue, with my name written in large letters in its place in the front. Only it wasn’t my name, for it read Mrs . Andrew Fraser, and my name of Kirsty MacTaggart was written in much smaller letters inside.
    Still, I was not complaining, for now there was nothing to keep us in London any longer. I longed for the feel of the wind in my hair and to breathe air that none had breathed before me and to be rid of the traffic and the endless noise. Cities are all very well, but you need, to accustom yourself to them gradually. I have never had the time to do so.
    On our last night in London, Mr. Fraser took me to the theatre, and very wicked I felt too. Oh, I could see for myself that my father’s ways were dead and done for, and I would not have chosen to make them mine, but the truly delicious sensation of guilt as we sat on those velvet chairs and watched the players on the stage before us, so close that I could sometimes glimpse their make-up, was a pleasure that no one could take away from me.
    Mr. Fraser, who is not a mean man, bought chocolates in the interval, brushing aside my thanks with one of his impatient looks.
    “It’s quite customary,” he said.
    “Is it so?” I retorted. I was in a good mood to be impertinent, for the envious glances of other females in the audience when they saw Mr. Fraser had not been lost on me. I had never thought to relish such reflected glory, but he had an air that brought all eyes to him wherever we were.
    “You’d better enjoy them while you can,” he said flatly. “Mary eats them by the pound if she gets her hands on them!”
    It was the first box of chocolates I had ever been given. I clutched them to me throughout the