The Rouseabout Girl by Gloria Bevan Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t wait for the moment of truth when she would accept his apology for the hurtful, high-handed treatment he had handed out to her. Lost in her exciting dream of the future, she took a moment or so for Sandy’s anxious tones to register in her mind.
    ‘You’re not thinking of turning it in, lass?’
    Lanie sent him a smile that was quite dazzling, a smile full of confidence and hope. ‘Not on your life!’

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    It should have been an enjoyable journey, Lanie mused as they sped south down the winding highway with its long stretches of farmlands and the occasional small settlement comprising a cluster of timber houses, a garage, a general store and old hotel, built alongside the road. It would have been pleasant travelling too, she thought resentfully, had it not been for the closed masculine profile she could glimpse from a comer of her eye. If only she didn’t have this odd awareness of him. Why couldn’t she be like Sandy, who, apparently unmindful of his son’s off-putting silence, was cheerfully pointing out to her the features of the various areas through which they were passing.
    Was Jard always so grim and uncommunicative, she wondered, or could it be she who had upset him? She could almost feel his disapproval and antagonism. You know the answer to that one! The errant thought shot through her mind that she could put up with his silent displeasure, but it was very hard to fight against this crazy awareness of his physical nearness. Thank heavens he had no way of knowing her feelings in that direction.
    Lost in her thoughts, she scarcely took in the road cut through vast pine plantations on which they were travelling, or the notices on the trees, ‘Young pines growing. Take care.’
    They had journeyed a long way towards their destination when Lanie, gazing id l y out of the window, suddenly caught her breath, forgetting everything else, even for a moment the man close at her side, in her first glimpse of Mount Egmont. Cloud-shadowed, the symmetrical cone reached into the translucent sky, snow-capped even in the heat of summer. The misty shape of the mountain seemed to travel with them as they followed the coastline and the miles fell away.
    Small towns flashed by the windows of the vehicle. Patea with its blue-roofed farmhouses and macrocarpa - lined road, its sculptured model of a carved Maori canoe set high above the municipal hall.
    ‘Finest dairy land in the island coming up,’ Sandy told her as they looked out on lush green paddocks studded with grazing cattle. Lanie roused herself to say laughingly, ‘I never thought the T.V. commercials for cheese factories down this way were real, the sky so blue, grass so green—not until now.’
    Presently they were passing high sandhills, the dark sand glittering in the sunshine. Lanie caught brief glimpses of sun-spark l e on water, distant views of rocky headlands and the white surf rolling in from the Tasman.
    Dusk was falling when at last Jard swung the vehicle off the main highway and into a metalled side road. They sped down into a punga-Alled gully then climbed a road winding over vast, sheep-threaded hills. Long shadows of overhanging bush lay across the road as they moved deeper into the hills and a purple haze filled the gullies. Lanie caught swift impressions of roadside notices, Wandering Stock, Beware Falling Debris. Then Jard was swinging the truck around a sharp bend, slowing speed to guide the vehicle past a drover on horseback, with his dogs. As they followed the lonely highway she caught an occasional glimpse of the sea, a darkening blue triangle between the hills. Through the gathering gloom she made out the outlines of sheep - drafting pens at the gates of long, poplar-lined drives leading up to lighted farmhouses high on dark slopes.
    As they swept on the headlamps of the truck illuminated a fragment of the winding road ahead, pinpointing the body of a possum trapped by the deadly attraction of lights in the darkness. Had