* * *
Sam felt sick with disappointment when Mac went on a motoring trip with friends, instead of coming home for the Christmas break before her seventeenth birthday, which fell in January. He wrote to say they’d hired an off-road vehicle and intended going up the coast to the York Peninsula then across to the Northern Territory.
Perhaps it was just coincidence, but Clare Norris didn’t come home that Christmas either. Mac sent a gift. Sam clipped the gold chain around her neck and, despite her anger at him, refused to remove it.
Barbara tried hard to salvage some of the mess at the shop, while Sam was learning to type. She attended animal husbandry seminars in all the nearby shires, convinced that when Mac graduated she would be his assistant.
Lonely Pride Page 10