"To every one," said Bob briefly.
CHAPTER XVII.
MOTHER'S HOME.
In the length and breadth of England there could hardly have been found a more lovely little property than Maze Court. There were larger houses in the neighbourhood, with more extensive grounds; but as Brenda Dixon stood on the terrace and gazed down towards the good old English park she felt a real glow of pride and pleasure in belonging to such a place. It was the sort of feeling she had whenever she brought a new school friend home for the holidays.
Beside her stood Herbert—long, lean, and very gentlemanly in his flannels. It was one of his sister's great joys that he always looked a gentleman in everything.
She was a striking-looking girl herself, with features a little too pronounced for accurate beauty; but this very fault had the effect of making her handsome. She had little personal vanity—mere features she cared nothing for—but pride of birth and of the old home were deeply rooted in her.
"I think Nesta and Eustace ought to be surprised," she was thinking; "they won't have seen anything like it. It will seem so big and splendid to them after the kind of life they have had."
Brenda was never very sure how to picture the Orbans' existence in Queensland. There was a touch of pettiness about it—a feeling of poverty and "hugger-muggerness," if one may coin such a word. The thought of her uncle going daily to his work in his shirt-sleeves; of her aunt helping in the housework; her cousins brought up just anyhow, without a governess or any schooling, shocked her sensibilities and gave vivid local colouring to her ideas about the Orbans. Those were the sort of details she would never have referred to at school.
And now she and Herbert were waiting for the arrival of the travellers, whom their grandparents had driven to the station to meet.
"Oh dear," she said with a sigh, "how I wish I didn't wish they weren't coming! If they are fearfully eccentric, all the neighbourhood will be talking about it in a week, and thinking it funny we have such relations. One can't explain to every one that they really are ladies and gentlemen gone to seed, can one?"