what she could see of herself in her mirror, and then she turned and went hatless down the side stairs and out to the river. The venom had now gone out of the heat, and the night was balmy and soft. She strolled along towards the centre of the town. At Queen Street she paused. She wondered if Dane Barrington were going back to the coast that night, and whether if she took that road she would meet him. She turned up a few yards, but then abruptly swung round and went on past the town wharf, the office, the railway wharf, and on towards the northern hills.
She had discovered four main roads leading out of Dargaville. One that she did not care for ran south along the Wairoa to Aratapu. The second was the camp road. The third went off across the flat in a northwesterly direction towards the forest and Kaihu, touching the railway here and there, and the fourth, the one she now explored, ran due north by the river.
About two miles from the town she came to a wooded point and saw the beginnings of a track trailing off into it. She could never resist a track, so she walked on through a bit of mixed bush that ended in a picturesque point and a rock projecting high over the water like a lookout. From it she got a fine view across the Wairoa of valleys filmed with indigo-tinted mist, and of bush-clad ranges outlined on the horizon like the coasts on a map with undulating layers of pigeon gray and rose fading off into a luminous opaline sky.
She threw herself down with delight at finding a retreat like this so near the town. As she sat, the little black steamer that ran between Dargaville and all wharves up to Tangiteroria came chugging down on the evening tide, and a small launch went racing by. She wished she could afford a boat. She wanted to go to the beginnings of the river in remote hills and lonely places. There was some-
