up to her table. It was Michael, with a tray and a glass and a bottle of wine.
“Mac’s compliments, miss,” he said with a sly smile, as he poured her out some.
She was absurdly pleased. She looked down the room, waited till Mac looked back at her, and then she raised her glass and drank to him. He answered her by a jerky movement intended to be some kind of salute. And that was her introduction to Thomas MacAlarney. Almost a week went by before she spoke to him.
III
The owner of the Dargaville hotel was the largest and most inarticulate Irishman in New Zealand. He was, for his race, singularly unapproachable. He had been born in Australia three months after his parents arrived there, and had early become a nomad about the gold fields. It was at Calgoorlie and Coolgardie that he made the money he afterwards put into the hotel business. He had drifted to New Zealand and Dargaville as men drift about the colonies, and finding only one poorly run house he had settled there and set himself out to get the trade.
Many adjectives would slip to the tongue at the first sight of him, but not the word prepossessing. He stood six feet two and required the seating space of two ordinary men. But he was not a floppy fat man. His enormous stomach was hard, his great arms were hard. The clutch of his hand was as inescapable as that of fate. His tomato-coloured skin looked very dry and shiny if he had just washed and very damp if he had not. He had a large round head covered with a lot of coarse gray hair, and a pointed beard always tidily trimmed. Heavy black eyebrows that showed hardly a streak of gray bristled
