“Hallo!” said her brother. “We didn’t hear you—where did you spring from?”
“Dad dropped me at the Corner—he had to go on to Harrods,” Norah answered. “I came across the grass, and you two were so busy talking you didn’t know I was there. I couldn’t help hearing what you said, Wally.”
“Well, I’m glad you did,” Wally answered, “But what do you think yourself, Nor?”
“I was just miserable until I heard you,” Norah said. “It seemed too awful to take Sir John’s house—to profit by his death. I couldn’t bear it. But of course you’re right. I do think I was stupid—I read his letter a dozen times, but I never saw it that way.”
“But you agree with Wally, now?” Jim asked.
“Why, of course—don’t you? I suppose I might have had the sense to see his meaning in time, but I could only think of seeming to benefit by his death. However, as long as one member of the family has seen it, it’s all right.” She flashed a smile at Wally. “I’m just ever so much happier. It makes it all—different. We were such—” her voice trembled—“such good chums, and now it seems as if he had really trusted us to carry on for him.”
“Of course he did,” Wally said. “He knew jolly well you would make good use of it, and it would help you, too, when Jim was away.”
“Jim?” said that gentleman. “Jim? What are you leaving yourself out for? Aren’t you coming? Got a Staff job at home?”
“I’m ashamed of you, Wally,” said Norah severely. “Of course, if you don’t want to belong——!” Whereat Wally Meadows flushed and laughed, and muttered something unintelligible that nevertheless was quite sufficient for his friends.
It was not a thing of yesterday, that friendship. It went back to days of small-boyhood, when Wally, a lonely orphan from Queensland, had been Jim Linton’s chum at the Melbourne Grammar School, and had fallen into a habit of spending his holidays at the Linton’s big station in the north of Victoria, until it seemed that he was really one of the Billabong family. Years had knitted him and Jim and Norah into a firm triumvirate, mates in the work and play of an Australian cattle-run; watched over by the silent grey man whose existence centred in his motherless son and daughter—with a warm corner in his affections for the lithe, merry Queensland boy, whose loyalty to Billabong and its people had never wavered since his childhood.