"Did you find the voyage pleasant, Miss Phillips?" asked Brandon.
"Oh, yes, very pleasant indeed."
"I did not think you would condescend to visit our rude latitudes," said Brandon.
"Oh, I am really quite enjoying my visit. Stanley was greatly pleased at my proposal to come out, for he thought it such an excellent thing for the family. I am only on a visit, you know. I cannot say how I should like Victoria for a permanence, but I like the novelty for the present."
"And your cousin is in Parliament, I hear, and likely to distinguish himself, Miss Melville," said Brandon. "I hope that you and your sister do not despise us poor colonial people."
"Certainly not," said Jane; "indeed, Francis says that he got most of his best ideas from Mr. Sinclair, who had been in Canada and the United States, and from a conversation between you and Mr. Phillips and Mr. Dempster the first day he dined with us in London. He says nothing sharpens an Englishman up like intercourse with such pushing, energetic, straightforward people as colonists."
"That is high praise from a British member of Parliament. I owe him something for that. But did you see Peggy before you left?"
"Yes; we went up to bid her good-bye. I think she will not be long in joining us," said Jane.
"Well," said Grant, who, as well as Harriett, felt that Miss Melville was receiving more than her fair share of Brandon's conversation, "you have not given at all a satisfactory account of yourself. You have been figuring away in Adelaide, I suppose, and enjoying yourself, and leaving your own affairs and Mr. Phillips's affairs to mind themselves."
"And you have been figuring away in Melbourne, Dr. Grant," said Emily—she could not bear any aspersion to be cast on her friend, Brandon—"and then you brought Aunt Harriett away; so you leave no one with poor mamma but Alice. I am wearying so to see mamma and the baby boy."