He had come forward, to help her gather the spilt petals. Perhaps it was the situation which made them copy each other. Their fingers held as for using chop-sticks, they were conveying the brown rose-petals back into the Chinese bowl. It was all most solemn and stilted. For Anthea at least, the faint scent of the dried petals turned the moment into a distinguished one.

‘Roses are something of a speciality of mine,’ Mr Mortlock was confessing. ‘I grow, but I don’t exhibit them. Human beings tend to lose sight of whatever they happen to be exhibiting,’ he added rather effectively.

‘Yes,’ Anthea agreed. ‘I am told the cage-bird world is worst of all.’

It was curious the sense of experience Mr Mortlock gave her. His hands, returning the pot-pourri to the bowl, had a masculine elegance which began to obtrude. He was wearing a blood-stone ring.

‘So I don’t show my roses,’ he said. ‘But have received compliments from several people who know what they’re talking about.’

‘Roses can be glorious.’ She sighed, and wished she could remember one or two names. ‘Even here.’

Because Mr Mortlock’s presence disposed her to apologize, for their house, for their city, which was dwindling into a provincial town.

In the pause which follows the close of a phase in conversation, the visitor was taking another look at her. She could sense that, very strongly, although she had turned her face, and stood dusting the last specks of pot-pourri from her mother’s waxed table. His appearance had remained with her. Out of her first embarrassed, fragmentary impressions, she could have described with exactness the expression he must be wearing at the moment.

Mr Mortlock was a man, if not old, well, older. She wondered briefly, how in the blurred Queensland past, he had come to be Daddy’s friend, and where the tailor existed who could mould that style of suit so beautifully to his still impressive figure. For he was not of the present. If anything she was touched by the fact, and would have been ready to defend his entry into a room full of contemptuous strangers – the shaggy destroyers, the Mollie Aspinalls and Barry Fleggs, even the Val Gilbert Tullochs. For Anthea Scudamore Mr Mortlock was not a stranger.

Yet, at this point, she had been with him long enough.

Showing him her face, she said earnestly: ‘I expect my father will come soon. You will have a lot to talk about.’ She smiled.

‘I bet Bill hasn’t any more to say than he had in Brisbane,’ Mr Mortlock answered.

Then it was one of those relationships, which she imagined, and at times hoped for, in which words did not matter.

‘In any case, you must excuse me,’ she said. ‘I must go up to my mother.’

He was very gallant in his not so old, but elderly gestures. His smile had practised on many faces.

‘I’ll be happy to sit a little,’ he said stirring up his money.’ ‘This is the right time of day.’