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looked across at her she felt a calm and an acceptance that had been denied her before, so he in his way was a high tower as well.
    Mr. Fortescue came across and put his arm around her and they all went back to the barracks. There was a big pot of tea and a big slab of project cake, yellow, sawdusty and containing one raisin.
    All the Brains came and kissed Gemma, and urged her to stay on. To stay on, anyway, they added, until she left to be married. There was no reason, they pointed out, why she shouldn’t keep to the plans she had told them about, and be married from the barracks.
    Gemma said she would think it over, then turned to find the Territorian by her side.
    “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, “for myself as well as for you. Bernard Drews, I mean. I knew him very well and I’ll miss him. I have a deep feeling for all these fellows, they’re doing work I wish I could have done, but I didn’t have those kind of brains, but rock I admired most of all. I’ve always loved rock. Yes, he’ll be a loss. I never dreamed he belonged to you.”
    “We belonged to each other,” Gemma said.
    “I can see that now. Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “Tell you what?”
    “That you were coming here.”
    “Why should I? I mean, we were only passing by.”
    “But we weren’t, were we? We met up again. But I’m sorry it had to be like this. What are your plans now?”
    “The men want me to stay;.. well, until I leave to be married. I’ll think about it, as I said.” She paused. “I’m still kind of hollow and unsure.”
    “Of course you are. That’s where your man comes in.”
    “My man?” She looked at him a little stupidly.
    “Your fiancé.” He was staring very hard at her, very alertly, not at all stupidly. “That’s what fiancés are for. For comfort. For a hand in yours. Don’t tell me” ... his eyes boring now ... “he doesn’t know yet.”
    “Everyone knows everything up here. You told me that yourself.” Her voice had risen a note.
    ‘They hear eventually, yes, but good grief, girl, in a thing like this you don’t let them hear, you tell them. Haven’t you told Mannering?”
    “No. You see, he wasn’t expecting me, I mean not yet. I mean, the arrangements were ... Oh, dear!” Gemma looked distressed, she clenched and unclenched her hands. “Should I have done so?” she implored.
    He was silent for quite a long time. Then:
    “Not unless you felt you should,” the Territorian answered, and he spoke quietly.
    “All the same,” he went on, “as you’re the Future Mrs. Mannering I’d give it a second thought.” Another pause, shorter this time, and after it another theme.
    “You got my note?”
    “Yes.”
    “In it I told the gem if she ever left her velvet box to call me up, but now I’ll say it with more dignity.”
    “Yes?” "
    “It’s this: If you should need me I’ll be waiting, Gemma.”
    “Why should I need you ?” she asked curiously.
    “I said if,” he reminded her.
    “I won’t need you.”
    “Then good for you, but not so good for me. However, what I’ve said still stands. And remember the high tower.”
    My rock, my strength, my deliverer, my buckler, my horn of salvation. My high tower.
    Gemma was thinking this as she carried down a bottle of milk later to poddy-feed Harriet. Well, the fellow was tall enough, but he was . . . and would be ... no tower. Bruce was her tower, and tomorrow she would go on to Mannering Park and begin her new life. She had decided on that.
    “You, too,” she promised Harriet, “but” . . . crumpling for a moment ... “I do wish, darling, you’d been able to meet Godfather.”
    Harriet just sucked on oblivious, and laughing a little Gemma continued dunking her fingers in milk then inserting them in the calf’s sweet pink velvet mouth.
    The next day Gemma put Harriet in the back seat again, kissed all the men goodbye, promised the geologists a better deal once she belonged to the House of Mannering and they left holes behind