The green blinds were drawn in the bungalows of the summer colony. Over the verandas, prone on the paddock, flung over the fences, there were exhausted-looking bathing-dresses and rough striped towels. Each back window seemed to have a pair of sand-shoes on the sill and some lumps of rock or a bucket or a collection of pawa shells. The bush quivered in a haze of heat; the sandy road was empty except for the Trouts’ dog Snooker, who lay stretched in the very middle of it. His blue eye was turned up, his legs stuck out stiffly, and he gave an occasional desperate-sounding puff, as much as to say he had decided to make an end of it and was only waiting for some kind cart to come along. “What are you looking at, my grandma? Why do you keep stopping and sort of staring at the wall?” Kezia and her grandmother were taking their siesta together. The little girl, wearing only her short drawers and her under-bodice, her arms and legs bare, lay on one of the puffed-up pillows of her grandma’s bed, and the old woman, in a white ruffled dressing-gown, sat in a rocker at the window, with a long piece of pink knitting in her lap. This room that they shared, like the other rooms of the bungalow, was of light varnished wood and the floor was bare. The furniture was of the shabbiest, the simplest. The dressing-table, for instance, was a packing-case in a sprigged muslin petticoat, and the mirror above was very strange; it was as though a little piece of forked lightning was imprisoned in it. On the table there stood a jar of sea-pinks, pressed so tightly together they looked more like a velvet pincushion, and a special shell which Kezia had given her grandma for a pin-tray, and another even more special which she had thought would make a very nice place for a watch to curl up in. “Tell me, grandma,” said Kezia. The old woman sighed, whipped the wool twice round her thumb, and drew the bone needle through. She was casting on. “I was thinking of your Uncle William, darling,” she said quietly. “My Australian Uncle William?” said Kezia. She had another. “Yes, of course.” “The one I never saw?” “That was the one.” “Well, what happened to him?” Kezia knew perfectly well, but she wanted to be told again. “He went to the mines, and he got a sunstroke there and died,” said old Mrs. Fairfield. Kezia blinked and considered the picture again.... A little man fallen over like a tin soldier by the side of a big black hole. “Does it make you sad to think about him, grandma?” She hated her grandma to be sad. It was the old woman’s turn to consider. Did it make her sad? To look back, back. To stare down the years, as Kezia had seen her doing. To look after _them_ as a woman does, long after _they_ were out of sight. Did it make her sad? No, life was like that. “No, Kezia.” “But why?” asked Kezia. She lifted one bare arm and began to draw things in the air. “Why did Uncle William have to die? He wasn’t old.”