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motives?’ she demanded. He was a very easy person to talk to, Georgina found.
    ‘I had ulterior motives.' The man pretended to hang his head. ‘Only '
    ‘Only?’
    ‘Only you looked like my kid sister if I’d had one,' he grinned.
    ‘Sure it wasn’t your brother?’ Georgina touched her short-cropped head.
    ‘Now I didn’t like to say that,' he laughed.
    ‘I don't mind. Well, I'd better not mind seeing that I--’
    I m not stubborn.’ Georgina returned to safe ground. ‘All females are.’
    ‘You sound rather like Roper of Lucy River when you talk like that.’ Georgina had not intended to bring up Roper again after her companion’s previous reticence, and she bit her lip.
    But she needn't have worried. The man looked across at her and asked:
    ‘So you know him?’
    She shook her head. ‘No.’
    ‘Yet you just said --’
    'Let’s put it that I’ve gathered an impression of him.’
    'Such as?’
    ‘As if he’s the way you just sounded when you called me stubborn.’
    ‘And that adds up to?’
    ‘A disliker of females,’ she asserted, ‘no, not a disliker in your case, for your “stubborn” was only in fun, wasn’t it?’
    ‘It was.’ He was watching her intently.
    But anything from him would come from a born woman-hater, I think.’
    ‘Not born, achieved. But yes, you’ve got it right.’ Georgina’s companion had made himself a cup of coffee and he got in behind the wheel to drink it beside her.
    ‘In all our talk last night we never got round to names ’ he told her. ‘I’m Craig Everson.’
    ‘Georgina Brown,’ she told him.
    ‘I was born up here, and, apart from school, reared up here. Then when my father died I inherited the station.’
    A shrug. ‘Small and badly run down. It wasn’t the old man’s fault, it was the drop in beef prices. He, then I, had the bad luck to coincide with the first cattle slump in years. The failure didn’t worry me, I was never keen, but the lack of funds did. Eventually I had to lease the place out and take on this travelling job. Interested in any farm machinery. Miss Brown?’
    ‘No,' Georgina smiled. ‘So even though you were born pioneer stock, the real instinct isn’t there?’
    ‘Not at all. I do this job only because I know it, know the country, know the people. If I knew the city as well, you’d never see me past the coast.’
    ‘And yet you spoke so graphically about it last night.
    ‘Of course. I love it, but only to look at and then go away again. I’m not a Larry Roper.’
    ‘Does he love it?’
    ‘Blindly,’ Craig grinned.
    ‘Is that his name, Larry?’
    ‘I thought you’d know.’
    ‘No, I don’t know,’ Georgina confessed.
    There was silence for a while. Craig Everson had produced breakfast biscuits and adroitly covered them with portions of canned bacon.
    ‘Lovely,’ Georgina appreciated.
    ‘Better than you would have served yourself?'
    ‘Oh yes, but I do have supplies, I’m well tuckered.’
    ‘You sound as though you’re really going somewhere. Somewhere further, I’d say, than the Westleigh you told me last night.’ His gaze was keen.
    ‘Yes, I am going further now. Westleigh would have been only an overnight stay.’
    ‘Will you call in regardless?’
    ‘I think not,’ she said.
    ‘Then where?’
    ‘You do want to know a lot, don’t you?’ Georgina laughed.
    ‘I do,’ Craig admitted. ‘I like company, particularly female company. To be truthful, in spite of my brotherly feelings for you last night, I have the reputation up here of something of a womaniser.’
    ‘Deserved?’ she asked mischievously.
    He grinned, shrugged and didn’t answer that. ‘Also,’ he went on, ‘although I can wax lyrical about it, I really dislike the bush. I guess I’m just a city slicker at heart. I like to be hemmed in, both with people and chatter.’
    ‘Then I’ll chatter,’ promised Georgina.
    He was easy to talk to and easy to get on with, and when, their coffee and breakfast biscuits finished, Craig