title: Opal Fire
author: Dengler, Sandy
description: "Peter, hurry home quickly. I need you."
  
  Four months after Polly Chase married an Australian, Peter, he went off to the War. Now, five years later, she is still waiting for his return. Coming back from town to her farm she encounters an itinerant, Colm Stawell, and lends him a needed hand. In gratitude he gives her a blue opal, alive with the sparkling "fire" that makes the best opals so valuable. He stays on as protection because her friend Maggie was attacked by no-goods. His friend David Kulgarra, an Aborigine, joins the party. When Colm seeks his fortune in the opal fields up north, Polly goes there as well to sell her handmade lace and build a nest-egg toward Peter's return. Polly has remained true in thought and deed to her Peter. Now she learns he is a vegetable, a war casualty in the vets hospital in Melbourne. Faced with the situation, she must decide whether God would have her annul her union with an insensate man to seek happiness with Colm or accept the responsibility of a promise made five years ago and destroy both her happiness and Colm's.