“Now, look here Lizzie,” and he kissed her, “I'm going to do my level best to please you, for you are my sister. I daresay I have done many things to displease you, but I love you, old woman, I do indeed. And whatever I may have said in the past I 'take back' as we bushmen say, and I want you to give me some of your affection. I know you have tons of it concealed under that prim little manner of yours, but you are too proud to show it. And see, Lizzie, old girl, I'm not really the reckless scallawag you think me to be,” and he stroked her hair, and looked so earnestly and pleadingly into her eyes, that her woman's heart triumphed, and she leant her head on his shoulder.
“I never thought you cared for me, Tom,” she said “and I daresay that I have been to blame in many respects. Edward is one of the best husbands in the world, but he is careless and all but irreligious, and I cannot—I really cannot change my nature and be anything more than politely civil to the friends he sometimes brings here—they are rough, noisy and bucolic. I am always urging him to leave a manager at Marumbah and retire from squatting altogether. I do not like Australia, and wish to live in England, but he will not hear of it, although we have ample means to enable us to live in comfort, if not luxury.”
Gerrard smiled as he gazed around the handsomely furnished room, and, mentally compared it with his own rough dining room on his station in the Far North.
“I should call this a pretty luxurious diggings, Lizzie,” he said; “there are not many such houses as Marumbah Head Station in Australia.”
His half-sister shrugged her shoulders. “You should see some of the country houses in England, Thomas. And then another reason why I dislike bush life is the utter lack of female society.”
Gerrard raised his brows. “Why, there are the three Gordon girls at Black River station, only ten miles away; they certainly struck me as being graceful, refined girls.”
“Mrs Gordon is not a lady, and makes no secret of it. Her father was a fishcurer at Inverness, and before that a herring fisher.”
“But she speaks, acts, and bears herself like a lady,” protested Gerrard.
“It doesn't matter—she is not one. How Major Gordon, who comes from an old Scottish family, could marry her, I cannot understand. She was a nursery governess, or something like that.”
“Yet Gordon seems a very happy man, and the girls——”