Even the two days’ journey in the most uncomfortable train on earth could not damp their ardour.  Most of the time Louis was gay and unusually chivalrous; at night, tiredness and heat cracked his nerves a little, making him cross and cynical until, sitting bolt upright on the wooden seat, she drew his head on her knee and stroked his eyes with softened fingers till he fell asleep.  At the stations where they alighted to stretch cramped limbs she stayed beside him all the time.  Once, by a specious excuse, he tried to get rid of her, but she saw through it and stayed beside him.  He resented it bitterly.

“Damned schoolmistress,” he growled.  “Always round me, like a limpet.”  In his eyes she read a flash of hate.

“My dear, do you think I want to be a limpet?” she said, “if I don’t you know we’ll never catch the train when it starts again.”

“Never have a free hand,” he muttered.

She was puzzled.  It seemed impossible to keep a constant watch on a man of Louis’s temperament.  He resented her vigilance though he demanded it.  If she seemed to be leading him, he bolted.  If she let him have his head, he still bolted.

When they were in the train again, drawing away through miles of scrub further and further from the cities, she felt very glad that the strain was going to end soon:  she would get a rest and so would he where probably he would have to go fifty miles to get a drink.  But she tormented herself with the fear that inaccessibility was not going to strengthen him; rather it would weaken, she was afraid.

At five o’clock the second day the train, which had dwindled down to one coach and five trucks, rattled and groaned into Cook’s Wall.  The station consisted of a rough wooden platform raised on wooden supports with a weather-board hut which the stationmaster called porter’s room, booking-office, luggage-office and station hotel.  Someone had ambitiously painted the name on the station.  “COOK’S WAL” and “STATION HOT” appeared in green letters on the face of the structure.  “L” and “EL” appeared round the corner in red.

The surroundings of the station looked quite hopeless; a few sun-baked sheep-pens and races stretched behind the Station Hotel, shimmering and wavering in the heat haze; half a mile away was a collection of home-made huts consisting of boxes and kerosene tins piled on top of each other.  A primitive winding-gear and a heap of slag marked the position of a small manganese mine which had been the cause for prolonging the single line railway so far into the Bush.  To the west and south and north stretched scrub and bush, right away to forest and purple hills on the far horizon.  Eastward the glittering rails shone back to the city, sending out blinding little flashes of light as the sun caught them.

The guard and driver got leisurely out of the train and stood on the platform; the stationmaster-cum-porter-cum-hotel-keeper, in a pair of dungaree trousers and a dusty vest of flesh-coloured cellular material which gave him the effect of nakedness, stared at them as though passengers were the last phenomenon he had expected to see.