Michael believed that Marya Rouminof intended Sophie to choose for herself whether she would stay on the Ridge or not, when she was old enough. But now she was little more than a child, sixteen, nearly seventeen, young for her years in some ways and old in others. Michael knew her mother had wanted Sophie to grow up on the Ridge and to realise that all the potentialities of real and deep happiness were there.
"They say there's got to be a scapegoat in every family, Michael," she had said once. "Someone has to pay for the happiness of the others. If all that led to my coming here will mean happiness for Sophie, it will not have been in vain."
"That's where you're wrong," Michael had told her.
"Looking for justice--poetic justice, isn't it, they call it?--in the working out of things. There isn't any of this poetic justice except by accident. The natural laws just go rolling on--laying us out under them. All we can do is set our lives as far as possible in accordance with them and stand by the consequences as well as we know how."
"Of course, you're right," she had sighed, "but----"
It was for that "but" Michael was fighting now. He knew what lay beyond it--a yearning for her child to fare a little better in the battle of life than she had. Striding almost unconsciously over the loose, shingly ground, Michael was not aware what direction his steps were taking until he saw glimmering white shapes above the grass and herbage of the plains, and realised that he had walked to the gates of the cemetery.
With an uncomfortable sense of broken faith, he turned away from the gate, unable to go in and sit under the tree there, to smoke and think, as he sometimes did. He had used every argument with Paul to prevent his taking Sophie away, he knew; but for the first time since Michael and he had been acquainted with each other, Paul had shown a steady will. He made up his mind he was "going to shake the dust of the Ridge off his feet," he said. And that was the end of it. Michael almost wished the men had let Jun clear out with his stones. That would have settled the business. But, his instinct of an opal-miner asserting itself, he was unable to wish Paul the loss of his luck, and Jun what he would have to be to deprive Paul of it. He walked on chewing the cud of bitter and troubled reflections.