The Pilot’s Daughter.
She came out of the creeper-covered house into a garden of roses, and stood with her hand on a green garden-seat; herself a rosebud bursting into perfection.
Below her were gravelled walks and terraced flower-beds, cut out of the hill-side on which the quaint, gabled house stood; her fragrant, small domain carefully secreted behind a tall, clipped hedge, over the top of which she could see from where she stood the long sweep of the road which led down to the port of Timber Town.
She was dressed in a plain, blue, cotton blouse and skirt; her not over-tall figure swelling plumply beneath their starched folds. Her hair was of a nondescript brown, beautified by a glint of gold, so that her uncovered head looked bright in the sunlight. Her face was such as may be seen any day in the villages which nestle beneath the Sussex Downs, under whose shadow she was born; her forehead was broad and white; her eyes blue; her cheeks the colour of the blush roses in her garden; her mouth small, with lips coloured pink like a shell on the beach. As she stood, gazing down the road, shading her eyes with her little hand, and displaying the roundness and whiteness of her arm to the inquisitive eyes of nothing more lascivious than the flowers, a girl on horseback drew up at the gate, and called, “Cooee!”
She was tall and brown, dressed in a blue riding-habit, and in her hand she carried a light, silver-mounted whip. She jumped lightly from the saddle, opened the gate, and led her horse up the drive.
The fair girl ran down the path, and met her near the tethering-post which stood under a tall bank.
“Amiria, I am glad to see you!”
“But think of all I have to tell you.” The brown girl’s intonation was deep, and she pronounced every syllable richly. “We don’t have a wreck every day to talk about.”
“Come inside, and have some lunch. You must be famishing after your long ride.”
“Oh, no, I’m not hungry. Taihoa, by-and-by.”