“Look again,” said the lady, “and fancy your face in thirty years’ time, with dark grey hair, all in little rough half-curls, and a great many lines in the brown skin all over the forehead, and about the eyes.”
“Yes,” said Nic eagerly, as he stared at himself.
“And a look of a man who is strong as a horse; and that’s all. No, stop: I forgot his birrd.”
“His bird! Does he keep a bird?”
“The young ruffian! he’s making sport of me,” said the lady. “I said birrd: b-e-a-r-d, birrd. And it’s all tinged grey and black. That’s your father.”
“And the girls?”
“Oh, just two bright sun-browned colleens, like you, only better looking. What next?”
“What sort of a place is it?”
“Place? Oh, there’s a wooden house on a slope looking down a bluff at the edge of a great plain, from which you look over the Blue Mountains.”
“Yes, they call them blue because they’re green, I suppose?” said Nic, with a smile.