"I'll show you," replied the Duke, in what struck the other as a superfluously confidential tone. "It was a little bit of a place, all one room, with a galvanised iron roof and mother-earth for floor. It was built with the very pines that had been felled to make a clearing for the hut: so many uprights, and horizontal slabs in between. A great square hearth and chimney were built out at one end, like the far end of a church; and over my bunk I'd got a lot of pictures from the Australasian Sketcher just stuck up anyhow; and if you weren't looking, you knocked your head against the ration-bags that hung from the cross-beams. You slept inside, but you kept your bucket and basin on a bench——"
"Good heavens!" cried Olivia. And she stood rooted to the ground before a clearing and a hut which exactly tallied with the Duke's description. The hut was indeed too new, the maker's stamp catching the eye on the galvanised roofing; and, in the clearing, the pine-stumps were still white from the axe; but the essentials were the same, even to the tin basin on the bench outside the door, with a bucket of water underneath. As for the wooden chimney, Olivia had never seen such a thing in her life; yet real smoke was leaking out of it into the pale blue sky.
"Is this a joke or a trick?" asked the girl, looking suspiciously on Jack.
"Neither; it's meant for the dead image of my old hut up the bush; and it's the little place I've fixed up for myself, here on the run, that I wanted to show you."
"You've had it built during these last few weeks?"
"Under my own eye; and bits of it with my own hand. Old Claude thought it sheer cussedness, I know; perhaps you will, too; but come in, and have a look for yourself."
And unlocking the padlock that secured it, he opened the door and stood aside for the young girl to enter. Olivia did so with alacrity; her first amazement had given way to undiluted interest; and the Duke followed her, straw hat in hand. There was a tantalising insufficiency of light within. Two small windows there were, but both had been filled with opaque folds of sackcloth in lieu of glass; yet the Duke pointed to them, as might his ancestors to the stained-glass lights in chapel and library, with peculiar pride; and, indeed, his strange delight in the hut, who cared so little for the Towers close at hand, made Olivia marvel when she came to think about it. Meanwhile she found everything as she had heard it described in the Australian hut, with one exception: there were no ration-bags to knock one's head against, because nobody made meals here. Also the pictures over the bunk were from the Illustrated London News, not from the Sketcher, which Jack had been unable to obtain in England; and they were somewhat unconvincingly clean and well-arranged. But the bunk itself was all that it might have been in the real bush; for it was covered over with Jack's own old blanket; whereon lay a purring, yellow ball, like a shabby sand-bank in a sea of faded blue.
"So this is Livingstone!" exclaimed the girl, stooping to scratch that celebrity's head.
"Yes; and there's old Tom and Black Maria in front of the fire. I lock them all three up during the day, for it isn't so like the bush in some ways as it is in others. They might get stolen any day, with so many people about; that's the worst of the old country; there was no other camp within five miles of me, on Carara."
"It must have been dreadfully lonely!"