"All the happier for being thrown so much together," said Mr. Orban. "We couldn't help it, of course, but ours have been thrown far too much with older people. This sort of thing is much healthier for them."
"It is all hateful," wept Nesta to her pillow that night. "Herbert is a bully, and Brenda is a stuck-up pig—and I wish we had never come."
And Eustace did not close his eyes for hours.
"Bob was quite right," he thought. "English people are horrid; they freeze you right up the minute you see them. But oh! I believe it would be better if only there was a veranda. They do live in such a queer way, all divided up like this."
Back into his mind there came the refrain of one of Bob's songs—the one he had sung to Aunt Dorothy the day of her arrival. He went to sleep with the tune ringing in his head,—
"Certain for darkies dis is not de place,
Where eben de sun am ashamed to show his face."
CHAPTER XVIII.
PETER MAKES A DIVERSION.
But for Peter and Becky schoolroom breakfast next morning would have been a very dismal and quiet affair, for the elder cousins had little to say to each other.
Herbert and Brenda cudgelled their brains for topics of conversation to keep things going, and they thought they had never had any one so difficult to talk to in their lives. The Australian cousins seemed downright stupid and uninteresting. Just for one thing Brenda was thankful—they were not outwardly so unpresentable as she had anticipated.