“Gently, my dear!” called mother after me, as the tail of my thin dress whisked round a rough bole of grape vine clasping a verandah post, and the bottom flounce parted with half a yard of lace. “I wish you would move more quietly, Kitty.”
“I wish I could, mother, but this lovely air is intoxicating,” I responded, tucking up my tail and dancing down upon the lawn and back again, with my hands stretched out. “I believe it will be cold by bed-time, really.”
The dinner bell rang, and I went indoors through the dining-room window, and took my seat at table. Father, spruce and fresh after a bath and change of clothes, stood up over a pair of boiled fowls, and shut his eyes, and muttered briskly, “For what we are going to receive—wing or breast, my dear?”—as if it were all one sentence (another little habit he had which mother would have liked to break him of, if she had not known her place too well). And mother, looking with her calm eyes upon the sun-browned, arid landscape beyond the garden gate, remarked, as she helped herself to a slice of pork, “I see Sandy now, crossing the ford. Let us get dinner over before we open the bag.”
We generally did what she told us, and we did now; but dinner was a brief ceremony in consequence. The fowls gave place to the puddings, and the puddings to the cheese, with a celerity that Ah Foo, the Chinaman cook, was not used to these hot days, and we left a lovely dish of raspberries and cream untouched for the first time that year. (N.B.—It was nearly the end of January, and they were just going out of season at Narraporwidgee.) Mother rose with her accustomed dignity, and went into the hall to sort the servants’ letters into the hands of Bridget the parlour-maid. She selected her own correspondence from the remainder, gave several letters and a bundle of newspapers to father, and then deliberately hung up the bag on its proper peg. Finally, we went out and seated ourselves on the verandah, now cool and breezy, with one of those sudden evening changes peculiar to the Australian climate; and father commenced operations by reading his newspaper telegrams aloud, as usual, and then tearing open the one English letter he had received.
“Well!” he exclaimed presently, and continued gazing at his letter, with a complacent smile on his honest face. Of course mother and I looked up at him expectantly.
“The market not gone down yet?” she inquired.
“No,” he replied; “I believe the tide is on the turn, but it hasn’t turned yet. Prices may even rise a little more, Norton thinks.”
“Dear me, I am very glad,” said mother; and so she looked, though she never visibly excited herself. She knew quite well that the price of wool, even at its then rate, if it lasted long enough (until father’s shipment arrived in London) meant an increase of a great deal to our income for the year; and she knew, too, that that increase meant so much more promise for her of the fulfilment of a great hope and scheme that she had cherished for many years. It was pathetic to see the wistful eyes that she lifted to his, as he continued to look in her face steadily.
“Yes, I know what you’re thinking of,” said he; “and I have been thinking of it too. I believe it might be managed now. I said to myself only this morning, while I was drafting those ewes, ‘If wool makes as much this year as it did last, I can afford to turn the whole concern over to somebody else, and Mary shall have her wish.’ So you shall,” he added, letting his broad palm fall upon her shapely shoulder. “We’ll wait till we hear the bales are in the market, and we’ll start home by the very next mail, if you like.”
I looked at mother, and her face was a study. A delight that would have overbalanced the self-possession of anybody else struggled to break through her cloak of dignified reserve, and she would not let it. Her eyes grew moist, and her mouth twitched at the corners; but she just took father’s hand from her shoulder, and laid it to her lips, and replied, gently, “Thank you, my dear; I shall be very glad. It will be such a good thing for Kitty.”