Eleanor smiled at the child and offered her another scone. Marguerite was only a few years Miss Trent’s junior. In a year or two her husband, any of their husbands, would look at the girl quite differently. The girl’s obliviousness as she sat playing with her mother’s rings, her utter guilelessness, now appeared disingenuous and so Eleanor smiled at the child. She offered another scone.

‘Marguerite, why not go and thank Mrs Flynn for the most excellent scones she has baked for us?’ said Cecily to her daughter, which was a curious thing for her to suggest—certainly her daughter appeared to think so, for she looked blankly at her mother but was persuaded, finally, on this mission and departed.

No sooner had she quit the room than Cecily shot forward and asked breathlessly, ‘You have seen the newspaper?’

She fired off her question so suddenly Eleanor was taken aback, and the look that accompanied it was pregnant with meaning, though what that meaning was Eleanor could not begin to guess. Unless …

Miss Trent. The arrest, the abortion, the police constables, the hospital, the doctor, her own husband—all of it swam before her eyes in large black bold letters on page five or perhaps page six of the Sydney Morning Herald.

‘Poor Adaline!’ said Cecily. ‘There were all manner of lurid and sensational details about the divorce in this morning’s paper—you must have seen it?’

Eleanor had seen it but could not, for the moment, speak.

And so Cecily went on, ‘The housekeeper was revealed to have had a child! Can you imagine? Its paternity is not definitively stated—for lawsuits are pending—but the inference was clear. Adaline’s children, or at least the two little girls, have been shipped already to grandparents in England and further lawsuits are anticipated … though one wonders who there is left to sue.’

She paused, and seemed at once to regret her gushy relaying of the events. Colouring a little, she sat back and arranged her hands on her lap, the pastoralist’s wife once more.

‘It is … dreadful,’ said Eleanor, and she could think of nothing further to add. Their friend’s downfall, terrible and spectacular and seemingly unstoppable, hung in the room between them.

‘I called on Adaline,’ said Cecily, after a little pause. ‘It seemed the charitable thing. And she was so kind and gracious and made no reference at all to any of it. It was really rather sad.’

Eleanor moved her arm and heard her blue gown rustle noisily. She lowered her arm and sat perfectly still.

To be pitied. The horror of it took her breath away.