Meantime, the younger Teesdale remained rooted to the spot where he had been very nearly kissed. He was still sufficiently abashed, but perhaps on that very account a plain speech came from him too.
“You're not like what I expected. No, I'm bothered if you are!”
“Much worse?” asked the girl, with a scared look.
“No, much better. Ten thousand times better!” cried the young man. Then his shyness overtook him, and, though he joined in the general laughter, he ventured no further remarks. As to the laughter, the visitor's was the most infectious ever heard in the weather-board farmhouse. Arabella shook within the comfortable covering with which nature had upholstered her, and old David had to apply the large red handkerchief to his furrowed cheeks before he could give her the message to Mrs. Teesdale, for which there had not been a moment to spare out of the crowded minute or two which had elapsed since the visitor's unforeseen arrival.
“Go, my dear,” he said now, “and tell your mother that Miriam is here. That's it. Mrs. T. will be with us directly, Miriam. Ah, I thought this photograph'd catch your eye sooner or later. You'll have seen it once or twice before, eh? Just once or twice, I'm thinking.” The group still lay on the table at Mr. Teesdale's end.
“Who are they?” asked the visitor, very carelessly; indeed, she had but given the photograph a glance, and that from a distance.
“Who? Why, yourselves; your own family. All the lot of you when you were little,” cried David, snatching up the picture and handing it across. “We were just looking at it when you came, Miriam; and I made you out to be this one, look—this poor little thing with the sun in her eyes.”
The old man was pointing with his finger, the girl examining closely. Their heads were together. Suddenly she raised hers, looked him in the eyes, and burst out laughing.
“How clever you are!” she said. “I'm not a bit like that now, now am I?”
She made him look well at her before answering. And in all his after knowledge of it, he never again saw quite so bold and dibonnaire an expression upon that cool face framed in so much hot hair. But from a mistaken sense of politeness, Mr. Teesdale made a disingenuous answer after all, and the subject of conversation veered from the girl who had come out to Australia to those she had left behind her in the old country.