– if traitor and part of Sevrin, was he the one who supplied some of their innermost secrets to Line Bartlett? No, Jacques couldn't have. He couldn't possibly have known about our bank holdings. Who knows about those? Who wou— "Father?" "Yes, Duncan?"
He heard the hesitancy, then his son said in a run, trying to sound manly, "Is it all right for a fellow to have a girl friend a little older than himself?"
Dunross smiled gently and started to dismiss the thought as his son was only just fifteen, but then he remembered Elegant Jade when he himself was not quite fifteen, surely more of a man than Duncan. Not necessarily, he thought honestly. Duncan's tall and growing and just as much a man. And didn't I love her to madness that year and the next year and didn't I almost die the next year when she vanished? "Well," he said as an equal, "it really depends on who the girl is, how old the man is and how old the girl is." "Oh." There was a long pause. "She's eighteen." Dunross was greatly relieved. That means she's old enough to know better, he thought. "I'd say that would be perfect," he told Duncan in the same voice, "particularly if the fellow was about sixteen, tall, strong and knew the facts of life." "Oh. Oh I didn't … oh! I wouldn't . . ." "I wasn't being critical, laddie, just answering your question. A man has to be careful in this world, and girl friends should be chosen carefully. Where did you meet her?"
"She was on the station. Her name's Sheila." Duncan suppressed a smile. Girls in Australia were referred to as sheilas just as in England they were called birds. "That's a nice name," he said. "Sheila what?"
"Sheila Scragger. She's a niece of old Mr. Tom and she's on a visit from England. She's training to be a nurse at Guy's Hospital. She was ever so super to me and Paldoon's super too. I really can't thank you enough for arranging such a super holiday." Paldoon, the Scragger ranch, or station as it was called in Australia, was the only property they had managed to save from the crash. Paldoon was five hundred miles southwest of Sydney near the Murray River in Australia's rice lands, sixty thousand acres—thirty thousand head of sheep, two thousand acres of wheat and a thousand head of cattle —and the greatest place for a youth to holiday, working all day from dawn to dusk, mustering the sheep or cattle on horseback, galloping twenty miles in any direction and still on your own property.
"Give Tom Scragger my regards and make sure you send him a bottle of whiskey before you leave."
"Oh I sent him a case, is that all right?"
Dunross laughed. "Well laddie, a bottle would have done just as well, but a case is perfect. Call me if there's any change in your flight. You did very well to get it organized yourself, very good. Oh by the way, Mama and Glenna went to London today, with Aunt Kathy, so you'll have to go back to school alone an—"
"Oh jolly good, Father," his son said happily. "After all, I'm a man now and almost at university!"
"Yes, yes you are." A small sweet sadness touched Dunross as he sat in his high chair, AMG's letter in his hand but forgotten. "Are you all right for money?"
"Oh yes. I hardly spent anything on the station except for a beer or two. Father, don't tell Mother about my girl."
"All right. Or Adryon," he said and at once his chest tightened at the thought of Martin Haply together with Adryon and how they went off hand-in-hand. "You should tell Adryon yourself."