"It hurts me, leaving the little ones," said Betty, who was now in imagination Madam S——. "You have no brothers and sisters to provide for."
John sighed. "No," he said, "I've no one but an old grandfather, and he grudges me every crust I eat. He's cut me off with a shilling."
For a space Betty was envious. For a space she liked John's imagination better than her own. That "cutting off with a shilling" seemed to her very fine.
He showed her his shilling. "I've that," he said, "to begin life on. Many a fellow would starve on it. I'm going to make my fortune with it."
They were the words one of his heroes had spoken, and sounded splendid to both.
"I've sixpence-halfpenny," said Betty, and unclosed her little brown hand for a second. "That's all!"
They walked on. In front of them and behind ran the dusty road, like a red line dividing a still bush world. Overhead was a tender sky, grey stealing shyly away to give place to a soft still blue. Already the daylight was wakening others than these foolish barefooted waifs. Here and there a frog uttered its protest against, mayhap, the water it had discovered, or been born to; the locusts lustily prophesied a hot day. Occasionally an industrious rabbit travelled at express speed from the world on one side of the red road to the world on the other. And above all this bustle and business and frivolity rang the brazen laugh of a company of kookaburras, who were answering each other from every corner of the bush.
After some little travelling the fortune seekers came upon a cottage standing alone in a small bush-clearing on their right. Three cows stood chewing their cud, and waiting to be milked, a scattering of fowls was shaking off dull sleep, and making no little ado about it, and near the door a shock-headed youth was rubbing both eyes with both hands.
Betty and John walked on. These signs of awakening life roused them to a livelier sense of being alive.
Yet a little further and they came to what Betty always called a "calico" cottage, which is to say, a cottage made of scrim, and white-washed. Windows belonged to it, and a door, and a garden enclosed by a brushwood fence.