“Well, there you are!” said Norah, inelegantly, but very earnestly. “Oh, Dad—let us all stay! We don’t want to go away. You don’t want us to go, do you?”
“Why, no; I don’t,” said her father, in perplexity. “As a matter of fact, I’d far rather be at home; indeed, I couldn’t be away for more than a very few days at a time. But the whole place will be upset, and I can’t see much fun for you youngsters in being there. It doesn’t seem quite fair to you.”
Jim began to laugh.
“It’s uncommonly difficult to plan for people who don’t want to be planned for, isn’t it, Dad?” he said. “Such a waste of noble effort! I believe we may as well give it up—they don’t seem to hanker after fleshpots!”
“Well, are you any better?” asked his father, laughing. “This was to be your holiday, too. You know you’ve put in a year of fairly hard work on the place, and I think you’re about due for a spell.”
“Me?” said Jim, in blank amazement. “Why, I haven’t killed myself with work—at least, I didn’t think so!” He grinned widely. “But I’m glad to know my valiant efforts impressed you. Anyhow, you needn’t make plans so far as I’m concerned; the old place is good enough for me, and if the other chaps don’t want to go away, I’m certain I don’t!”
“You see, Dad,” said Norah, earnestly, “we’ve got the tents—and perhaps we might put up a bigger one, in case of bad weather, and make a really ship-shape camp down by the lagoon, and just have our meals at the cottage. And everything will be so interesting at the house—and we’d have the horses!”
“It’s really all your own fault, sir,” Wally told him. “You’ve given us the taste for tent life, and you can’t blame us for becoming nomads. There’s already something of the Arab sheikh about Jean, and any one would mistake Jim for a dervish! Fancy shaking down to a boarding house at Queenscliff after this!” He waved a brown hand towards the dim outline of scrub, seen faint against the starlit velvet of the sky.
“It would be awful!” said Jean, with such fervour that every one laughed.
“And we can’t leave you, Dad,” Norah said. “It would spoil everything. I don’t believe you’d enjoy it, and certainly I wouldn’t call it really holidays unless we were with you. It seems all wrong to go away—not a bit like being mates. And we’re always mates.”