But he pushed her aside.
'Don't speak to me—none of you speak one word,' he said, and he stooped and dropped the box where the flames leapt.
'No, no, no!' Hermie screamed, and rushed at it, and put a hand right through the flame and touched the box, then drew back, helpless, crying.
'Get away!' Bart said, and pushed her back from danger and took the work himself, a rake for aid.
He dragged the charred box out, Miss Browne fluttered round him and caught at the lid and burnt her hands, and fell over the rake and singed her hair and eyebrows. Roly and Floss, carried off their feet by the excitement, rushed to help, and the box lay safely on the grass again, two minutes from the time it had been in the flames.
'Let it alone, no one dare to touch it!' commanded the father, and the voice was one the children had never heard before.
He picked the box up, hot and blackened as it was, and flung it on the fire again; the lid fell off, there came a rain of tubes and paint-brushes, a splutter or two from the turpentine, the smell of burnt paint, then the fire burnt steadily again, and there was silence that only Hermie's bitter crying broke.
The father had gone back to the house; he came down to them once again and this time The Ship was in his arms.
Surely an ill-starred ship! There had been no money to send it to Sydney for the artists there to appraise; Cameron, absolutely frightened when he found how the debts were growing, exhibited it in Wilgandra and a neighbouring town or two, and marked it ten pounds.
But who in the back-blocks was going to give that sum for a picture without a frame? The coloured supplements, with elaborate plush surrounds, satisfied the artistic yearnings of most of the community, and The Ship came back to sad anchorage in the Cameron dining-room.