When Mrs Ester had removed the pencil from behind her ear and checked this calculation she took Molly to her office where she examined her in arithmetic. She discovered that the girl could add up columns of figures in her head. She did not even move her lips.

"Now, my girl," Mrs Ester said, "you listen to me. You will not throw yourself at the first man who comes along."

"No, Mrs Ester."

"You are a decided commercial asset, you mark my words."

"Yes, Mrs Ester."

"You are only sixteen. There is no need to rush off and marry in a hurry."

"No, Mrs Ester."

"Would you like to learn about the business, how to pay the staff and the brewery and add up figures? I will pay you a pound a week."

"Thank you, Mrs Ester."

"You will not spend the pound, Molly. (Do not fidget.) You will put it in the bank every week as long as you work for me, and when you get married you will not tell your husband about it, is that clear?"

"Yes, Mrs Ester."

"Do you swear?"

"I cross my heart, Mrs Ester."

"How much is a glass of best stout?"

"Three pence."

"You are a good girl, Molly," said Mrs Ester taking the girl's two hands in hers in a rare, grabbing, embarrassed gesture of affection. "You will be a credit to the Crystal Palace Hotel."

And, had it not been for Henry Lightfoot, she would have been right.

Walter and Sean had not been given electric belts, and they were not happy. It was only Molly who was happy and she knew she had no right to it. No one could say that she was not a good daughter or a loving sister. Indeed she was, when she could be, a perfect Little Mother. When the remains of the family assembled on Sundays she brought a needle and thread for Walter's trousers, a newly knitted balaclava for Sean, wool and darning needles for her father's socks.

Walter was dark and silent and hit at the trunks of trees with stick or boot and Sean clung to her side while she darned their sleeping father's socks. Beside the weed-choked waters of Lake Wendouree their mother's death lay over them. Sean tugged insistently at her skirt. The men in their rowing sculls could not move freely through the water.

She hid the pleasures of the Commercial Room from her family. She did not tell them about Henry Lightfoot. She did not confess her hopes for the Hospital Auxiliary Ball. She fled these Sunday afternoons earlier than she should have, and was punished by guilty dreams because of it.

Henry Lightfoot had a property at Bunningyong and did not come to Ballarat as often as he would have liked, but when he did come he always wore nice suits, and although he was a big man his body did not fight against the constrictions of his suit and his neck did not bulge against his Oxford collar.

"Do you like to dance, Miss Rourke?" he had asked her. He had a warm sweet smell, like straw.

"Oh, yes, Mr Lightfoot," she said.

He had fair hair and dark black eyebrows. Apart from a slightly beakish nose he was decidedly handsome. He was going to ask her to the ball but she saw him frown, lose courage, and order a pint of bitter instead. She liked him better for his loss of courage.

Tonight, she knew, he would come again, because there had been sales in Ballarat and Henry Lightfoot had sold fifty fattened beasts for a record price. The little Scot from Elders Smith had already given her the details of the sale. He said it was a great day for Henry Lightfoot.

Her heart was beating too fast. It fought to free itself from the magnetic restrictions of her belt. It wanted to go wild, on its own loud boastful erratic dance.

Henry Lightfoot entered the Commercial Room. He was aptly named. He walked on the balls of his feet, and she saw that he was already a little drunk. It was not like him to be drunk, but she was pleased he was drunk. She hoped he was drunk enough to ask her to the ball.

He smiled at her; he did not come to the bar immediately but joined the ruddy pipe-smoking Scot from Elders and the round-shouldered man from the Courier Mail. His mind did not appear to be on the conversation he was having. He rocked back and forwards on his shining black shoes which showed only the faintest smear of sale-yard mud.

When he came, at last, to the bar, he was carrying his companions' empty glasses. He was smiling, but she was too excited to look closely at his smile.

She blushed.

Had she not been so intent on trying to stop the blush she might have looked more closely at his face and she might have detected a malice in the smile which the men who had dealings with Henry Lightfoot knew to be part of his character. He was both handsome and charming, but he was also a bully with a keen nose for weakness.

He stood at the bar, jingling the loose change in his pocket, swaying gently. His smile was moist, his handsome mouth a little slack.

Molly's red hair was piled handsomely high, and although it accentuated a tendency towards jowliness, it also showed the soft white skin of her neck. There was nothing to hide her blush.

"You've been keeping a secret from me, Miss Rourke," said Henry Lightfoot.

"No," she said, "I promise you," but blushed even deeper, because she had confessed her hopes about the ball to Jenny Grillet.

"It's not a secret," Henry Lightfoot said. "It is too wonderful", he teased, "to be a secret. It is too extraordinary. No, no, dear Molly Rourke, 'tis no secret any more."

He had never called her Molly before. The blush spread down her neck until it seemed it would take possession of her shoulders.

"Everybody," he said, "all Ballarat knows."

"Oh," she dared look up. She held him with her bright green eyes. "And do they now, Mr Lightfoot?"

"Indeed, Miss Rourke. Indeed they do."

"And what secret is this?"

"They say", he whispered, "you wear a belt to stop you going mad."

She did not leave the bar. She stayed working. She gave correct change. She counted the money in the till at closing time. She helped Patchy wash the glasses in the public bar.

I had this in common with Molly: we had both pretended our fathers dead, although for different reasons. And while Jack had heard of Mrs Ester, he knew nothing of her father or Walter or Sean. He knew nothing of the electric belt, Dr Grigson, or that Molly had risked her mortal soul by marrying him in a Protestant church.

And although there were many times when she came, teetering, giddy, her hand in his, to the very brink of confessing her faith, she could not. He made it impossible. He had no time for Catholics. This is not to say that he would not, journeying down to Colac to visit his backers, make a detour to Koroit, that Catholic town, drink in the pub and be a good fellow amidst Murphys and Keoghs and Hanrahans, but that he carried a schoolboy's prejudices with him and was always only a hairbreadth away from those sing-song insults that Protestant children call out to the Catholics on the other side of dusty streets: "Catholic dogs sitting on logs, eating maggots out of frogs." He was for Australia and the Empire, had voted Yes to conscription and regarded Archbishop Mannix as nothing less than a traitor.

And in Cocky Abbot, that dimple-chinned, ruddy-faced giant, he found a kindred spirit. They could relax together, in their certainties. They were both big strong men in their fifties, men who had begun life poor and ended up rich. They trusted each other's money. They trusted each other's size and their hands, when shaking, fitted together like two halves of the one puzzle. They were, as the farmer put it, practical.

They sat together on the veranda of the Abbots' homestead late in the afternoon and rolled up their sleeves in defiance of the chill in the evening air. Had you seen them, sitting on their rattan chairs, you would have shared their conceit, that they were two of a kind, and you would be wrong. For the farmer was a harder, tougher man, ruthless in a bargain and with a head for figures not suggested by his slow countryman's drawl.