Life, so long a hopeless tangle, smoothed itself out at last for the little family. Challis was well again, and had gone off to give a series of concerts in the respective capitals of each colony; gone off in high spirits, touched with sweet responsibility, inasmuch as she was the bread-winner for the family. Mr. Cameron went with her this time, and her mother stayed thankfully at home on the selection. And Australia, despite the fact that she neither recited 'The Absent-Minded Beggar,' nor yet had 'Sons of the Empire' in her repertoire, gave her so warm a welcome everywhere that in three months she was back again at The Rosery with a fresh thousand pounds put to her credit in the bank.
This pleasant sum was to pay passages across the sea for all the family.
For, warm-hearted as the big overgrown young island had proved, its eager, easily roused enthusiasm would soon be turned upon some other object, and there would be no permanent opening for the girl-musician. She must go to the little, pulsing, crowded island the other side of the world for that.
Mrs. Cameron had the plan of campaign all in readiness in her head. They were to find an ideal house in a pleasant countrified suburb just out of London, and Challis, accompanied by her father, was to fulfil her English engagements from there.
When she went abroad, they would all, when possible, go with her, and make headquarters in some inexpensive French or German village. The benefit of a varied life like this would be incalculable to the young ones, after the stagnant years at Wilgandra.
Bart was to go to an English public school the moment they touched land after the voyage. He had but three or four years left now in which to crowd all his school education, and he was eager to begin. In general education and the making of moral fibre, Wilgandra had done a better work than Eton or Rugby could ever hope to do.
'But I shall come back and be a squatter,' he always insisted. 'No other life for me.'
'If he sticks to that,' old Stevenson said to his father, 'send him back to me. I'll give him a start, and be thankful to do it. He's got the stuff in him to make the kind of man this country wants.'
Then he fell to chuckling over the memory of the calf that Bart had sold him, and so started the intimacy between them.
Hermie was to travel as much as possible, take lessons in various subjects from good masters, and go on with her general education under the able guidance of her mother. And there were picnics and dances and all manner of brightness for her in her mother's campaign, to counteract the grey monotony of her earlier girlhood.