No further word of the matter was ever said till the next Christmas, when the boy marched in with the year's prize for punctuality under his arm. Then Cameron shook hands with him.
'I like a man of honour,' he said. But the two events together, the grocer's bill and the master's call, decided the father he must enter into submission and have another lady-help, for the children's sake.
How to obtain one? He made inquiries about Wilgandra, but the class of people from whom he sought to take one were of the mind that prevails in many of the country towns and bush settlements. They would rather starve than serve—at all events where they were known. Now and again a self-respecting intelligent girl broke away from her life and went off with her trunk to find service in Sydney.
But, for the most part, the daughters of a house up to the number of seven, or even ten, stayed under the cramped roof-tree of their fathers, and led an unoccupied, sheepish existence, till marriage or death bore them off to other homes.
So in despair Cameron wrote off to a Sydney registry office, and asked the manageress to send him a lady. Just before he closed the letter the happy freedom of the last three months led him to add a postscript, 'I should like the lady you select to be of not too managing a disposition—gentle and pleasant.'
The registry office keeper rubbed her hands; here surely at last was a chance to dispose of Miss Browne—Miss Browne, who was ever on the books, who was sent off to a situation one week, and came back with red eyes and a hopeless expression the next, dismissed incontinently as incapable.
The registry office keeper turned up the town Wilgandra in her railway time-table.
Three hundred and seventy-three miles away! Surely at such a distance, especially as the employer was paying the expensive fare, Miss Browne might be regarded as settled for a space of three months!
Mr. Cameron had no complaint to make of his new lady-help on the score of being of a managing disposition. She was gentleness itself—that kind of deprecating gentleness that makes the world feel uncomfortable. She tried pitifully hard to be pleasant—pleasant and cheerful. She worked from earliest morning to late at night, and accomplished about as much as Hermie could in two hours. It took her nerveless fingers nearly a quarter of an hour to sew on a waistcoat button, and in little more than a quarter of an hour the button would have tumbled off again.
Lizzie seldom trusted her to cook anything; when she did so the poor lady invariably emerged from the kitchen with her hands burnt in several places, sparks in her eyes, the front width of her dress scorched, her hair singed, and her poor frail body so utterly exhausted, the family would insist upon her instant retirement to bed.