She listened with her grave, pale face and—he saw now that he was standing before her—steady grey eyes and an unwavering gaze, a small and neatly shaped nose, a high forehead, a slightly jutting chin and a stillness. Yes, that was it: a stillness of expression and of body that told him nothing. And now he began to wonder if he had not been mistaken, for her very stillness, her calmness, her unwavering gaze, unnerved him. He fell silent, unable to gauge her response to his sudden presence. He was aware of the unceasing flow of men hurrying past and around them, oblivious, and it seemed extraordinary to him that they should fail to notice her. He wished very much to say something vital and heroic, for it seemed to him the moment demanded it, that he had it in him to deliver such an utterance.

He said, ‘Let me take you for a cup of tea.’

And she accepted, but in a way that made him feel, somehow, that she was gracing him by her acceptance.

They found a teashop one street back from the quayside and ordered tea.

‘My name is Miss Trent,’ she said finally, as they awaited the tea. She looked down at her gloved hands. Poorly made gloves, cheap, not the gloves of a lady, but not a servant either.

He waited. She had a story to tell and so he waited as a boy might wait for a bird to hop down from a branch to peck seeds from his hand.

‘I am stranded,’ she said—admitted—and it seemed that this might be all she would admit. But after a pause she went on: ‘I came here to New South Wales to join my fiancé, Mr John Brewster of London, who was offered a government post and who sailed out here three months ago and began his new post and then sent for me, but he caught a fever not long after, and before I even reached Cape Town I received word my fiancé was dead.’

She paused again. Not, he felt, because her tale was tragic—though it undoubtedly was—and she sought his sympathy, but simply because the waitress placed the tea before them. When the girl was gone, she resumed her story:

‘I arrived in Sydney a few days ago, alone and friendless and with no means of support and no means of securing a passage home. My fiancé’s family are shopkeepers from a small town, you understand?’

He did understand. The grieving parents had many sons and more daughters. They had packed their youngest son off to the New World with best wishes and, to be sure, they mourned his loss, but towards his fiancée (to whom their son was not, when all was said and done, actually wed) they felt no obligation.