Return to Coolami by Eleanor Dark

aren’t I? We’ll be home to-morrow. I’m not a fool, Bret.”
    He shook his head ruefully.
    â€œIf good intentions could make a marriage, Susan, ours would be a winner. We’ve both tried hard enough.”
    She stood uplooking at him with a strange little smile.
    â€œThe tea’s probably cold,” she said. “Dad’s been saying, ‘Call them,’ and Mother’s been saying, ‘Leave them alone.’ Come on, Bret.”
    He followed her. Half-way up the path she paused and looked back at him.
    â€œTrying’s no good,” she said. “I’m going to playact.”
    He said sharply:
    â€œDon’t do that. At least you’ve been honest. Acting won’t help us.”
    Her smile curled into open contempt.
    â€œYou won’t know it’s acting,” she said.

CHAPTER TEN
1
    No, Drew thought,sipping his mug of strong tea and watching them come up the path, Millicent’s elaborately wangled tête-à-tête hadn’t done much good after all. Susan walking ahead with her chin up looked – well, when she was a kid, her father thought grimly, that expression on her face had many times been followed by a spanking!
    What the deuce, he wondered, passing Millicent two mugs for them, had she been saying to that husband of hers to make him look so white about the gills? And in a sudden surge of sympathy for a harassed fellow-male he decided that women were the very devil – and his daughter in the first flight of them—
    So he made room for Bret on the rug, passed him his tea, offered him sugar, plied him with sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, assuring him mutely of his moral support in a world most insufferably complicated by the moods and the whimsies of women.
    Susan, disdaining the rug, had perched on a rock nearby. She was merry and voluble, talking at Bret and round him, her words darting, stinging, retreating, stinging again. There wasn’t, Drew marvelled irritably, anything you could get hold of at all, and yet she kept you wincing, not so much from what she had said as from what you thought she was going to say next. You couldn’t ignore her any more than you could ignore a wasp circling within inches of your head. Notthat Bret wasn’t making a very good show of it, looking at the valley, eating his way stolidly and silently through a large ham sandwich—
    Drew looked helplessly at Millicent.
    Lord how these women hung together. She was staring at her daughter with unmixed pity, and she said suddenly:
    â€œSusan, bring your breakfast, and walk along to that point with me.”
    Susan stopped in mid-sentence and faded. It did really seem to her father as though Millicent’s words had turned out a light somewhere inside her. Her eyes flickered for a moment, startled like the eyes of some one suddenly awakened. She bit into her hard-boiled egg, looked at Bret, looked at her mother, stood up:
    â€œAll right, Mother. Come on.”
    They went. Drew cleared his throat and said weightily to Bret:
    â€œA queer thing, that blue. Never been satisfactorily explained, I understand —”
2
    Bret said, “No?” refilling his mug from the billy. For the second time that morning he was staggered by his own capacity for silent fury. No one, nothing in the world had ever got under his skin as surely as Susan – or Susan’s pride, or Susan’s misery, or whatever it was that drove her when she had these devilish and impossible moods—
    But this time beneath his anger some obscure, panicky doubt was pricking him.
    â€œYou won’t know it’s acting.”
    There was, in that, an implied contempt for his perceptiveness that bit deeper because of an uneasy suspicion that it might be justified. Would he? She must, he reasoned, be pretty damn sure of herself to say that. As a burglar, who said, “I’m going to break into your house to-night by the kitchen window,” would need to be