"No, we are only going to be," she said, with a happy little laugh, for it was fine to have achieved one's heart's desire with so little delay in the getting, and she was setting her face towards the new and untried life with radiant happiness in her heart.
"I am going to Cape Town, so I shall have to say goodbye to you when your voyage is only half done, although it would have been a great pleasure to me to have seen you safely ashore and in the care of your father. Does he meet you in Sydney?" asked the gentleman, when he had told Nealie that his name was Melrose, and that he was at the bottom as English as she was herself.
"I don't know; I suppose he will, for Mr. Runciman would have written to tell him the name of the ship we were coming by," said Nealie; but now there was a dubious note in her tone, for she was trying to remember whether Mr. Runciman had said anything about having written to her father. She had thought of writing herself, but had refrained from doing it because of the feeling of hurt pride which was still strong upon her, as it had been ever since she read the letter which was not meant for her.
"What will you do if he does not?" asked Mr. Melrose.
"Oh, we shall find our way out to Hammerville! That is the name of the place where he lives. There are seven of us, you see; it is not as if we were just one or two," she answered brightly.
"Hammerville? I wonder whether that is the Hammerville in the Murrumbidgee district, where Tom Fletcher went to live?" said Mr. Melrose in a musing fashion. "They have a little way of repeating names in these colonial places which is rather distracting. But Fletcher told me that the Hammerville to which he went was nearly three hundred miles from Sydney."
"I suppose there is a railway?" queried Nealie, knitting her brows, and wondering how they were all to be transported for three hundred miles across an unknown country, in the event of there being no railway by which they could travel.
"I suppose the rail would go a point nearer than three hundred miles, unless indeed the place is quite at the back of beyond, as some of those Australian towns are," replied Mr. Melrose. "But Fletcher told me that he hired a horse and wagon and drove the whole distance, sleeping in the wagon at night to save hotel charges."
"Oh, what a perfectly charming thing to do!" cried Sylvia, who had come up behind and was leaning over the back of Nealie's chair. "If Father is not waiting to meet us when we reach Sydney, shall we hire a horse and a wagon and drive out to Hammerville, Nealie?"
"It would be very jolly," said Nealie, with shining eyes. "I have always longed to go caravanning, but I expect the difficulty would be to find anyone willing to hire a horse and wagon to entire strangers like ourselves; and if Hammerville is so far from Sydney, Father would hardly be known so far away, even though he is a doctor."