"THANK YOU," SHE SAID.[ToList]
[Page 30.]
The youth looked after her, with something of a glitter in his watery blue eyes. As her horse entered the narrow space between the school-house wall and the yard fence, the girl looked back again and laughed, and the youth dug his spurs unnecessarily hard into his horse's sides as he resumed his ride down the road. He felt that he ought to have followed her through the gate—and he dared not.
The girl meanwhile rode past the cottage, which stood back from the school-house, and into the paddock beyond, giving a soft coo-ee as she passed. The horse found its own way to the shed where the bridle and saddle were kept, and the girl lightly slipped from its back and took off both. Having put them inside the shed, she roughly groomed the horse—which stood so still, it seemed to be proud of the attention—before returning to the cottage, the horse following her as far as it could, with its nose rubbing against her shoulder.
Inside the cottage a pale, delicate-looking man sat in a chair in front of a wood fire, on which a kettle was boiling and steaming. He put down the book he was reading as she came in.
"I wasn't long, Dad, was I?" she asked, as she came across the room to his side and bent down with her hand on his.
"No, child," he answered softly. "What news had the Murrays?"
"Oh, it was all the same old tune," she answered, as she stood up and took off the mushroom straw hat she was wearing, revealing as she did so the wealth of golden hair, twined round the top of her head in a heavy coiled plait, to which she owed the name of "yaller head" among the frequenters of Marmot's verandah. "It was all Tony Taylor, Tony Taylor, Tony Taylor. Heavens! why can't the man go gold-digging if he wants to? The way people talk——"
"Who came with you down the road?" her father interrupted to ask.
"Oh, that fool of a Dickson," she replied, with a short laugh. "He was hanging around the place, so I told Nellie Murray to go out and see what he wanted; and she, big fool that she is, brought him in, and then nothing would do him but he must ride home with me."