He wrote long letters of his love and she wrote back brief notes, mostly about her job and house and these were carried endless miles by trains through a blur of eucalypt forests, but after a time the letters to Sydney took longer to be answered and the silences in midnight forests became longer and the agony of sensation on his neck and palm more unbearable and finally one morning young Bill Peterson stood in the doorway grasping the mail from Sydney and he had stared into the hut until at last he rushed from the doorstep and it wasn’t until half-way home that he felt the letters still in his hand and he flung them far into the ferns and wattles and ran in a wild-eyed rush to his father.