CHAPTER V.
RACHEL'S FIRST VISIT IN MELBOURNE.
IN the last week of August, when the place was looking its loveliest—the rustic gables of the pretty house all hung with wistaria, and the shrubberies full of fragrant bushes of purple and white lilac—Mrs. Hardy, Mr. Kingston, and Rachel took their departure from Adelonga. It was to one of them a truly heart-breaking business.
Rachel stood on the verandah while the horses were being put to, clasping Lucilla and the baby alternately to her heart, and wept without restraint, until her eyes were swollen, and her delicate colour resolved into unbecoming red patches, and there was scarcely a trace of her beauty and brightness left.
No one but herself was at all able to realise what this moment cost her. She was not only leaving a place where she had spent the happiest period of her youth; not only parting from friends with whom she had established the most tender and sympathetic relations; she was closing a chapter, or rather a brief passage, which was the one inspired poem of her life; and she was saying good-bye to Hope.
As long as she was at Adelonga, there was the chance that Mr. Dalrymple might come back—at any rate, notwithstanding the Queensland arrangements, there was a constant impression that he was near. And as long as she was at Adelonga she had felt bold to strive, by various feeble and ineffectual devices, to extricate herself from her engagement.