But I was younger for the first three

The old clock ticked; both pairs of hands continued to flash about the tortoise-shell stems of their needles. "Tell me something, Mum," said Meggie suddenly. "Why did you break over Dane when you didn't over Daddy or Frank or Stu?" "Break?" Fee's hands paused, laid down the needles: she could still knit as well as in the days when she could see perfectly. "How do you mean, break?" "As though it killed you." "They all killed me, Meggie. But I was younger for the first three, so I had the energy to conceal it better. More reason, too. Just like you now. But Ralph knew how I felt when Daddy and Stu died. You were too young to have seen it." She smiled. "I adored Ralph, you know. He was . . . someone special. Awfully like Dane." "Yes, he was. I never realized you'd seen that, Mum -I mean their natures. Funny. You're a Darkest Africa to me. There are so many things about you I don't know." "I should hope so!" said Fee with a snort of laughter. Her hands remained quiet. "Getting back to the original subject-if you can do this now for Justine, Meggie, I'd say you've gained more from your troubles than I did from mine. I wasn't willing to do as Ralph asked and look out for you. I wanted my memories . . . nothing but my memories. Whereas you've no choice. Memories are all you've got." "Well, they're a comfort, once the pain dies down. Don't you think so? I had twenty-six whole years of Dane, and I've learned to tell myself that what happened must be for the best, that he must have been spared some awful ordeal he might not have been strong enough to endure. Like Frank, perhaps, only not the same. There are worse things than dying, we both know that." "Aren't you bitter at all?" asked Fee. "Oh, at first I was, but for their sakes I've taught myself not to be." Fee resumed her knitting. "So when we go, there will be no one," she said softly. "Drogheda will be no more. Oh, they'll give it a line in the history books, and some earnest young man will come to Gilly to interview anyone he can find who remembers, for the book he's going to write about Drogheda. Last of the mighty New South Wales stations. But none of his readers will ever know what it was really like, because they couldn't. They'd have to have been a part of it." "Yes," said Meggie, who hadn't stopped knitting. "They'd have to have been a part of it."