Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/58

 "You talk all the sense, don't you, kiddie?" he said, with a strong Australian accent again. And as he spoke with his face upturned to her, his Adam's apple moved in his strong white throat as if it chuckled.

"Of course I do," she crooned in her mocking, crooning contralto. "Of course I do."

He put his arm round her hips. They continued to look into each other's faces.

"It's awfully late. We shall have simply to fly to bed. I'm so sleepy now. Good-night. Thank you so much for the singing. I enjoyed it awfully. Good-night!"

Victoria looked up with a brightly-flushed face, entirely unashamed, her eyes glowing like an animal's. Jack relaxed his grip of her, but did not rise. He looked at the Somers pair with eyes gone dusky, as if unseeing, and the mask-like smile lingering on his face like the reflection from some fire, curiously natural, not even grotesque.

"Find your way across all right?" he said. "Good-night! Good-night!" But he was as unaware of them, actually, as if they did not exist within his ken.

"Well," said Harriet, as they closed the door of Torestin. "I think they might have waited just two minutes before they started their love making. After all, one doesn't want to be implicated, does one?"

"One emphatically doesn't," said Somers.

"Really, it was as if he'd got his arm round all the four of us! Horrid! said Harriet resentfully.

"He felt he had, I'm sure," said Somers.

It was a period when Sydney was again suffering from a bubonic plague scare: a very mild scare, some fifteen cases to a million people, according to the newspapers. But the town was placarded with notices "Keep your town clean," and there was a stall in Martin Place where you could write your name down and become a member of a cleanliness league, or something to that effect.

The battle was against rats, fleas, and dirt. The plague affects rats first, said the notices, then fleas, and then man. All citizens were called upon to wage war with the vermin menioned. Alas, there was no need to call on Somers to wage the war. The first morning they had awakened in Torestin, it was to a slight uneasy feeling of uncleanliness. Harriet, who hated the thought of contamination, found