The child seemed to shrink into her shell instantly.
'I will get the reins,' she said nervously, obediently.
Into the midnight they talked, the father and mother; and all they could say was, this was no child to hand over to a boarding school or strangers.
Wilgandra and the towns around grew clamorous. They grudged every moment that the child was not being taught, and having contributed solid coin of the realm for her education, they were vexed at the shilly-shallying in using it.
So to Sydney the mother went, half fearfully, Challis and a modest trunk beside her in a second-class carriage.
'We shall be back in a month at most,' she called out for the twentieth time reassuringly to her family seeing the train off.
But Sydney seemed in league with Wilgandra. Without a doubt, it said, the most wonderful child performer ever heard. It wiped its eyes at her concerts, when the manager had to get thick music-books to make her seat high enough; it stood up and raved with excitement, when she stepped off the stool at the end of her performances and rushed off the stage, to bury her excited little face on her mother's breast.
Without a doubt, it said, with its peculiar distrust for the things of its own, here was no child to be confined to Sydney teachers; it insisted she must have the best to be had in the world, and thrust its hands recklessly into its pockets.
Mrs. Cameron at the end of six months went back to Wilgandra, the anxious outlook in her eyes again, and five hundred pounds in her pocket, the result of concerts and subscriptions given for the purpose of sending the child to Germany.
And now what to do?