He had married a fair girl, the orphan daughter of a bankrupt squatter whom he had met in Sydney, and had brought her and her sister into the Queensland bush with him. His wife idolized him. His sister-in-law, Kate Daly, loved him dearly--as she had cause to do, for he had proved himself to be a very brother to her; but she feared him also somewhat. The people about the Mary said that she was fairer and sweeter to look at even than the elder sister. Mrs. Heathcote was the taller of the two, and the larger-featured. She certainly was the higher in intellect, and the fittest to be the mistress of such an establishment as that at Gangoil.
When he had washed his hands and face, and had swallowed the very copious but weak allowance of brandy-and-water which his wife mixed for him, he took the eldest boy on his lap and fondled him. "By George!" he said, "old fellow, you sha'n't be a squatter."
"Because I don't want him to break his heart every day of his life."
"Are you always breaking yours? I thought your heart was pretty well hardened now."
"When a man talks of his heart, you and Kate are thinking of loves and doves, of course."
"I wasn't thinking of loves and doves, Harry," said Kate. "I was thinking how very hot it must have been to-day. We could only bear it in the veranda by keeping the blinds always wet. I don't wonder that you were troubled."
"That comes from heaven or Providence, or from something that one knows to be unassailable, and therefore one can put up with it. Even if one gets a sun-stroke one does not complain. The sun has a right to be there, and is no interloper, like a free-selector. I can't understand why free-selectors and mosquitoes should have been introduced into the arrangements of the world."
"I s'pose the poor must live somewheres, and 'squiters too," said Mrs. Growler, the old maid-servant, as she put a boiled leg of mutton on the table. "Now, Mr. Harry, if you're hungered, there's something for you to eat in spite of the free-selectors."
"Mrs. Growler," said the master, "excuse me for saying that you jump to conclusions."
"My jumping is pretty well-nigh done," said the old woman.
"By no means. I find that old people can jump quite as briskly as young. You have rebuked me under the impression that I was grudging something to the poor. Let me explain to you that a free-selector may be, and very often is, a rich man. He whom I had in my mind is not a poor man, though I won't swear but what he will be before a year is over."