river and the sea with not a thing to attract settlement except the depth of the river on that side. It had no water supply save the uncertain one of rainfall. It faced a great swamp. But it was now the growing town of a prosperous and booming timber and dairying district.
It was the river that most interested Valerie as she walked along. It was the best commercial waterway in the North Island, and on its upper reaches it was hauntingly beautiful. It stretched away into gumfields and remote valleys. Little steamers and launches fussed continually upon its strong current, and at any moment a ship might come gliding round a bend.
But Dargaville had its distinction. It was blasé, and liked to say the world came to its doors. It was used to the unusual, to men who had roamed the whole earth, to all the types that go down to the sea in ships. Governors and members of Parliament passed through it to shoot. Newly arrived Englishmen came spying out the land. Remittance men came to its banks to cash orders signed by titled names. And it was used, too, to seeing bodies that had been fished out of the river covered with an old sheet and carried on a stretcher into Mac’s hotel. It was used to seeing the constable marching solemnly between painted ladies who had just arrived from Auckland, and who had to be returned by the steamer by which they came without damage to the morals of the youth of the town and before they could escape to the bush.
Dargaville had not been astonished when a woman doctor took charge of the Aratapu hospital, three miles down the river. So it had taken calmly the information that the new paper would have a woman on the editorial staff. Nor was it unduly surprised to learn later that the woman was young and amazing, and that she was living in Mac’s hotel.
