'She knows about the selection.'
'We've—we've been tidying up a bit, dad. I think you'll find it's a bit—er—tidier.' There was a flush on the boy's cheek, a look of suppressed excitement in his eyes. 'Let's get on now; the horse doesn't like to stand, and everything's in.'
They drove up the road that wound out of civilised Wilgandra away to parts where the bush took on its wild character again, and rolled either side of them in unbroken severity and loneliness for miles.
But it was early winter now, and the thankful land lay smiling and happy-eyed beneath a cooler sky. Even the newest clearings flaunted rich carpets of grass, green as grass only springs where a bush fire has purged the ground for it. The air was fragrant with the bush scents that rise after rain. A cool, quiet breeze swayed the boughs of the ocean-waste of trees, here and there it lifted the long string of warm-coloured bark—autumn's royal rags—that hung from the silvered trunks.
Cameron was driving, and mechanically turned the horse's head at the place where he had always turned for the sliprails of his selection.
And there were no sliprails!
He turned an astonished glance at Bart, but the boy's eyes only danced.
'I'll get down and open the gate,' he said demurely, and jumped down while his father stared at the neat white gate with The Rosery painted on in black letters. Could this be Dunks' selection that stretched before the head of the horse that bore them slowly along? This the grey, dreary place that had cast its colour over the souls of those who looked at it. A drive ran up from the gate to the house, not a smooth, red gravelled drive by any means, but it was cleared and stumped now all its length and width, and went with pleasant windings between the trees.
A low white two-rail fence divided the bush and sheep ground from the land about the house; the small orchard showed freshly ploughed up and trenched between the trees; a vegetable garden was laid out, and the peas and beans were above the ground already. The flower-beds near the house were dug and weeded, as if they had been beds in the Botanical Gardens; and dahlias, little sunflowers, and cosmea of all shades made a gay mass of colour. The pixies' hands had even attacked the cottage; Cameron himself had given it a coat of red paint that had much altered its forlorn aspect; these new hands had carried the coat of paint even over the dreary galvanised iron roof, had 'picked out' the chimneys, and windows, and verandah-posts with white, added a seven-foot verandah all round, and knocked a French window into the walls here and there.
'Why,' cried Challis, 'it's the sweetest, darlingest little place I ever saw! Oh, I never want to go away from it again!'