The Foot of Time: A Novel of Australia and the South Seas: (1933)

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CHAPTER IX.
SYDNEY'S LUNCH HOUR.
AT the period of the bathing episode which so
nearly found a tragic ending at Palm Beach, Bruce
and Edith both attended the University in Sydney.
The girl stayed with her mother's only sister,
Florence Tooth, who resided at Manly, across the
Harbour, returning to her parents' home in Orange
each week-end, while Bruce travelled daily to and
from Vaucluse—a shorter trip—in one of the
harbour ferries.
Thus it came about that the pair began to meet
for lunch increasingly often as time went on. They
would take a table well back on the left-hand
recess of Thorne's, in Castlereagh Street, and hope
against hope that the other would turn up. No
definite arrangement was made to meet, but the
number of circumstances which brought one or the
other of them to the lower end of that lengthy
city thoroughfare was amazing.
Commencing years before with a gift of a
Meccano set on one of Clare's Christmas trees, Bruce
had evinced a definite proclivity towards engineering.
His branch was ship-building, in which vast
study he was arousing much speculative interest
with some of the professors, who prophesied a
future for him. Edith aroused no interest with
t.
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THE FOOT OF TIME 69
anyone, in the scholastic sense, being simply an
average all-round student. Edith would never have
matriculated but for the determination of character
which she inherited from her rough diamond of a
father.
A dogged persistence won through, however, and
now she was studying at things she would never
need, learning "they new-fangled notions," as her
dad put it—and lunching with Bruce.
Be it said, here and now, for there is no gainsaying
the fact that Bruce was in love with Edith
and Edith—? Edith loved him.
Be it also said that neither Bruce, on his part, nor
Edith, on hers, was a type of individual who took
this infectious complaint lightly. Neither were
they of those who, sensing it coming, succumb to
it without a struggle, nor were they of a nature to
throw over the condition once properly acquired.
But while Bruce had a speciality, Edith had a
craze. Her craze was aeronautics. She possessed
an air sense, and was mad to fly, not for a name,
but for flying's sake. Now airplanes and all their
seaplane brothers and sisters were the pet abomination
of William Burne. His bigoted animosity to
them was a factor with which Edith would have to
reckon, and so the girl had perforce to carry out
her studies—and her practice—in secret.
"I've no patience with they things," her father
would declare. "A sin they be in the eyes of the
Almighty. Poaching on his preserves, as you might
say. The air's for the winged creatures who praise
Him and magnify Him for ever. The land's good