“Certainly, Miss Grant. My mother will only be too glad. She was sorry that we did not get down to meet you. The letter was delayed.”
Mary Grant laughed as she looked down at Mrs. Donohoe’s clothes. “What a sight I am!” she said.
“But, after all, it’s Australia, isn’t it? And I have had such adventures already! You know you will have to show me all about the station and the sheep and cattle. Will you do that?”
Hugh thought there was nothing in the world he would like better, but contented himself with a formal offer to teach her the noble art of squatting.
“You must begin at once and tell me things. What estate are we on now?” she asked.
“This is your father’s station. All you can see around belongs to him; but after the next gate we come on some land held by selectors.”
“Who are they?”
“Well,” said Hugh, a little awkwardly, “they are relations of Mr. Blake’s. You’ll see what an Australian farmer’s homestead is like.”
They drove through a rickety wire-and-sapling gate and across about a mile of bush, and suddenly came on a little slab house nestling under the side of a hill. At the back were the stockyards and the killing-pen, where a contrivance for raising dead cattle—called a gallows—waved its arms to the sky. In front of the house there was rather a nice little garden. At the back were a lot of dilapidated sheds, leaning in all directions. A mob of sheep was penned in a yard outside one of the sheds; and in the garden an old woman, white-haired and wrinkled, with a very short dress showing a lot of dirty stocking and slipshod elastic-sided boot, was bending over a spade, digging potatoes.
The old woman straightened herself as they drove up.