He’d visited them three times before now, once not long after they’d arrived and then again a few months after that, and then a third time just last week. Each time he’d come wearing the same grimy outfit, the same crumpled shirt and ancient sheepskin waistcoat, the same greasy serge pants, the same bit of cotton rag about his thin neck. The only thing she noticed that was different about him today was that he seemed to have brought nothing with him; whenever he’d come to visit them before, he’d always brought some kind of neighbourly gift. The first time it had been a quarter pound of his own butter, the second time a jar of pumpkin seeds. Last time, a loaf. This time his small weather-beaten hands were empty; today Henry Fowler seemed to have brought nothing but himself.

He was forty-five years old – a small, scrawny-looking man with bow legs and rough brown hands no bigger than a woman’s.

At sunrise he’d stood with one of those hands resting on the wooden rail of his rickety veranda at the far end of the valley, watching his new neighbour’s black horse and dray moving slowly along the road in the direction of the town, wondering if the handsome husband was travelling by himself – if the young wife would be alone there today.

It was six months now since he’d watched them come in on the same road with a pile of furniture tied onto the dray. Since then he’d seen her three times. Three times he’d gone over there with a neighbourly gift. Three times he’d walked about outside with the husband, admiring the progress they’d made. The beets and peas and beans, the potatoes and the fat new pigs. The two hundred chickens, the cow. Three times he’d sat with the two of them inside the house drinking tea and for weeks now he’d been spending the evenings sitting on his veranda and looking out across the grassy desert towards their place.

Susan. That was her name. Susan Boyce. For weeks he’d been thinking about her and practically nothing else. Her stiff, cold, proud-looking face, the closed-off, haughty way she had of speaking to him, the way she couldn’t stand him looking at her.

When he could no longer see the dray on the horizon, when it had disappeared completely from view, he went inside for a while and then he laced up his boots and put on his hat and climbed up onto the seat of his high sloping buggy and set off along the track down the valley to her house.

He sat now, at her table, tamping the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with his little thumb, watching her at the stove.