A bunch of workmen were lying on the grass of the park beside Macquarie
Street, in the dinner hour. It was winter, the end of May, but the sun
was warm, and they lay there in shirt-sleeves, talking. Some were eating
food from paper packages. They were a mixed lot--taxi-drivers, a group
of builders who were putting a new inside into one of the big houses
opposite, and then two men in blue overalls, some sort of mechanics.
Squatting and lying on the grassy bank beside the broad tarred road
where taxis and hansom cabs passed continually, they had that air of
owning the city which belongs to a good Australian.
Sometimes, from the distance behind them, came the faintest squeal of
singing from out of the "fortified" Conservatorium of Music. Perhaps it
was one of these faintly wafted squeals that made a blue-overalled
fellow look round, lifting his thick eyebrows vacantly. His eyes
immediately rested on two figures approaching from the direction of the
conservatorium, across the grass-lawn. One was a mature, handsome,
fresh-faced woman, who might have been Russian. Her companion was a
smallish man, pale-faced, with a dark beard. Both were well-dressed, and
quiet, with that quiet self-possession which is almost unnatural
nowadays. They looked different from other people.
A smile flitted over the face of the man in the overalls--or rather a
grin. Seeing the strange, foreign-looking little man with the beard and
the absent air of self-possession walking unheeding over the grass, the
workman instinctively grinned. A comical-looking bloke! Perhaps a
Bolshy.
