There was also a piano with a mountain of music. Also a few chairs and a table.
Bartie dragged off the saddle and harness, flung them on the verandah, and turned Tramby loose among the sheep. Then he went into the house.
There rose up listlessly from the doorstep and a book an exquisitely pretty girl of seventeen, a girl with sea-blue eyes and a skin that Wilgandra could in no wise account for, so soft and fresh and pure it was. You saw the same face again and again in the canvasses about the room, sweetest as Isis, with the tender, anxious look of motherhood in her eyes, and Horus in her arms. This was Hermie.
'Have you got the mail?' she asked.
Bartie nodded.
'Go and fetch father,' he said; 'he's down with the roses, I saw his hat moving.'
He flung himself on the ground, listless with the heat; Floss dragged off her hot frock and her shoes, and revelled in the pleasure of her little petticoat and bare feet. Roly looked plaintively at the table, on which was no cloth as yet.
'Miss Browne,' he called, the very tears in his voice, 'Miss Browne, isn't tea ready?'
A faded spinster, lady-help to the family for six years, came hurrying into the room.
'Poor Roly!' she said. 'Yes, it is too bad of me, dear; I was mending your best jacket, and didn't notice the time. But I'll soon have it ready now.' She ran hastily about the room looking for the cloth, and at last remembered she had put it under the piano-lid, to be out of the dust. She put on the vases of exquisite roses that Hermie had arranged, and a wild collection of odd china and crockery cups and enamelled ware.