"Run down to the luggage van and have your trunks brought up here. Then they can go up to the school with ours. There's plenty of time. Paddy will be some while fetching Orpheus along with the truck; he always crawls about like a snail."
As Kitty obediently went off down the platform with her long strides, many of the girls turned round to stare after her as she passed, for she was far from being an insignificant girl. She was tall, long-legged, and at a rather bony and angular stage of growth. Her face was very tanned after the sea voyage and, like the majority of Australian girls, her complexion was nothing to boast about; she had cropped, bright brown hair and alert grey-blue eyes; there was something in her carriage and the active swing of her walk that betrayed an outdoor life with plenty of exercise.
"This is yours, miss," said the porter obligingly. "For the school, miss? Here's another one for the school. Take them both up the platform, Tom."
The second trunk, as Kitty noticed with a quick observant glance, was very smart and expensive looking; and painted in white very conspicuously across the top, in great contrast to Kitty's humble initials, were these words: "The Hon. Duane l'Estrange Estevan."
Kitty was immensely tickled.
"My gracious!" she said to herself. "What a name! If it were mine I should want to drown it. An Honourable, too. I sort of think, if I run across her, I shan't hit it off with the Hon. Duane l'Estrange Estevan. That is to say, if she's anything like her trunk, or her name."
Australians are far less tolerant in their criticisms than the English, and Kitty was no exception, you see.
Returning to Eileen and her party, she found that a little shambling man was loading a truck with the girls' hand luggage.
"Come along now," said Paddy. "We can leave these things to Orpheus. We call him Orpheus," she explained to Kitty, "because he blows the chapel organ. He's got an undeveloped cerebrum, you know, poor chap."
"Please, Paddy," remonstrated Salome. "We're not in school yet!"