Page:Jane Mander--The Strange Attraction.pdf/15

 But such of the town as met the steamer that day looked curiously at the newcomers for several reasons. Bob was the son of the Bishop of Auckland, and Valerie was the daughter of that city's cleverest and best-known lawyer, Davenport Carr. The glamour of this combined social distinction made the local dignitaries look a little weak. Not that the town would have admitted it in public. Indeed it was prepared to resist any undiplomatic move on the part of the outsiders to teach it anything with the undue haste usually showed by outsiders in impressing little towns. But it stared this day with a friendly feeling, for the two were good to look at, and the town immediately sniffed the possibility of romance.

Bob and Valerie were radiantly healthy, with the kind of vitality that did not wilt even in that dissolving atmosphere. They stood tall and straight, unaware of smoke-choked lungs, their eyes untroubled by the glare that radiated off the zinc roofs of the sheds.

In spite of her tedious train and steamer journey Valerie had contrived to arrive with the air of having merely strolled out of a nearby street. She wore a plain dark linen dress with a narrow pale blue collar round the pointed neck, and a soft linen hat to match. She wore white canvas shoes that had stayed white, and white open-work cotton stockings. There was not a superfluous inch of material about her. She carried a good black travelling bag which Bob now held.

Valerie was not conventionally beautiful, but she carried an internal dynamo that shot sparks at the passerby and made him forget his manners, turn his head and won-