“No, but I really believe I feel like one—at least, I do whenever I am with Jim and Wally,” Norah had answered. “And when we get back to Billabong it will be just as it always was—we'll be three boys together. You know, it's the most ridiculous thing to think of Jim and Wally as grown-ups. Dad and I can't get accustomed to it at all. And as for Jim being a major!—a major sounds so dignified and respectable, and Jim isn't a bit like that!”
“And what about Captain Meadows?”
“Oh—Wally will simply never grow up.” Norah laughed softly. “He's like Peter Pan. Once he nearly managed it—in that bad time when Jim was a prisoner, and we thought he was killed. But Jim got back just in time to save him from anything so awful. One of the lovely parts of getting Jim again was to see the twinkle come back into Wally's eyes. You see, Wally is practically all twinkle!”
“And when you get back to Australia, what will you all do?”
Norah had looked puzzled.
“Why, I don't know that we've ever thought of it,” she said. “We'll just all go to Billabong—we don't seem to think further than that. Anyway, you and Bob are coming too—so we can plan it all out then.”
Looking at her, on this last night of the voyage, Cecilia wondered whether the unknown “Billabong” would indeed be enough, after the long years of war. They had been children when they left; now the boys were seasoned soldiers, with scars and honours, and such memories as only they themselves could know; and Norah and her father had for years conducted what they termed a “Home for Tired People,” where broken and weary men from the front had come to be healed and tended, and sent back refitted in mind and body. This girl, who leaned over the rail and looked at the Point Lonsdale light, had seen suffering and sorrow; the mourning of those who had given up dear ones, the sick despair of young and strong men crippled in the very dawn of life; and had helped them all. Beside her, in experience, Cecilia felt a child. And yet the old bush home, with its simple life and the pleasures that had been everything to her in childhood, seemed everything to her now.
Cecilia went softly to her side, and Norah turned with a start.
“Hallo, Tommy!” she said, slipping her arm through the new-comer's—Cecilia had become “Tommy” to them all in a very short time, and her hated, if elegant, name left as a legacy to England. “I didn't hear you come. Oh, Tommy, it's lovely to see home again!”
“You can't see much,” said Tommy, laughing.