Life was an endless drab again.
She went listlessly out, and stood on the doorstep to look at it.
Her father did not want her, he had pushed his lunch aside, and bidden her, irritably—he who was so gentle—to leave him to himself.
Bart, poor grave little Bart, a man at fourteen, was working about the place. Neither he nor the young ones had gone to school while the father had been ill. He and Roly had been all the morning beating monotonously at a bush fire just across the road. There was no excitement about it, there seemed little danger; the fire burned quietly, steadily—it had been burning for two days—but this morning it had crept to the fences; the boys had been obliged to cut boughs and beat at it.
Roly sat on the fence most of the time, and sleepily kept back the cunning yellow tongues from the patch Bart had entrusted to him. Bart walked up and down, mechanically threshing out the little licking flames that longed to curl round the fence.
Sometimes he left Roly on guard, and went to do necessary work, feed the two calves, shed a burning tear over the dying sheep, give Tramby a few drops of water.
Hermie went down to him wearily, a sun-bonnet on her head.
'There's no danger about the fire?' She looked at it a little apathetically.
'Oh no; if there were three of us, we could put it all out. Roly's not much use, of course.'
'Bart, what are we going to do?'