About a week later Eileen got a most unaccountable fit of home-sickness. She had received long letters telling her about the clover paddocks, and the dew glistening on them first thing in the morning, and how fat the horses were; and all of a sudden Sydney grew distasteful.
Sitting at her desk, the thought of those long green stretches would come to her; the thought of the green-clothed gullies, with the children racing up and down on their ponies; the thought of the big blue gums along the creek, waving long brown strips of bark wildly in the wind, and the big fire of myall logs burning brightly in the Gillong dining-room at night, and the gleaming white frost on the corn cobs in the cultivation paddock shining under the rays of the wintry sun. And one day she put her head on the desk and burst into tears. She wanted to be there straight away. After all, there was no place like home, and she wanted to go right up and mount her horse and race all over the paddocks. The teacher was astonished.
“But there’s nothing to stop you from going home, is there?” she asked kindly.
“N—no!” blurted Eileen, “but I didn’t want to go until now, and it just came on real sudden, like a bad tooth-ache, and I couldn’t help c-crying. I’m—I’—m not coming back to school any more. I’ll get ready and go straight home.”
There was consternation in the Taylor household when they heard of Eileen’s resolution.
“No, I’ve been real happy with you, Mrs. Taylor, and I’ll miss you all dreadfully, but I’m real home-sick—you know, I think country people suffer from home-sickness,” she went on apologetically, “and I just can’t wait another day. Every time I hear the thud of a horse’s hoof it makes me lonely, and you’ve all been real kind—and—I’ll always like you—but—all the same, I must go home.”
Mrs. Taylor just knew how she felt, and helped her to pack up, and was as kind as her Mother, and Marcia was almost heart-broken.
“You must come back again as soon as you can, Eileen. Oh, dear! I won’t have half the fun now that you’ve gone. No one to talk to about people and the music teacher or anything else.”
Then Mrs. Taylor fell to worrying about Willie. She wondered was her little boy home-sick, too, and didn’t like to say; and she wrote him a very long letter, and told him to be sure and come straight away if he felt like it, and how she thought he ought to come home now in any case, and how she missed him. And the heartless little Willie, when he received it, grunted and said, “Just like a woman!” Then he sat down and wrote her a long letter to satisfy her, and to let her see “once and for all” that her little boy was not in the least home-sick, or even likely to be.
And one afternoon Eileen boarded the North-West train, and with many promises of letter-writing and much fluttering of pocket handkerchiefs and farewell messages she was whirled away to the far North-West Bushland.