Aileen was smiling, too, at what she found on her plate: books and music, a very new aluminium saucepan, a soap-saver for the kitchen, and, tucked away under the rest, a little brooch within which a black opal gleamed mysteriously, full of dark fire. Aileen loved black opals: but she regarded them as belonging to the old times when evening dress and balls and theatres were as common as working overalls and fowl-rearing and hoeing now. She shook her head at Tom.
"You shouldn't—bless you!"
"Oh, I had to!" he said; "I couldn't help it. I haven't altogether forgotten the girl who liked pretty things."
"She's very contented to have put them away," said Aileen.
"I know. But I wanted to see her in one," he said obstinately. Whereupon Aileen, to please him, pinned the brooch in her overall, and found herself greatly enjoying it as she prepared dinner.
They jogged to church behind Roany, and exchanged greetings with a few people they knew and with many to whom they were strangers—except that every one knew that they were "the new, hard-working lot that's come to Gordon's farm," and being simple, kindly-minded Gippsland settlers, saw no reason why they should wait to be formally introduced. Then they came home to a happy Christmas dinner—everything cold, and therefore as it should be, with the thermometer at 95°—after which, by mere force of habit, Aileen was about to go to work in the garden, but was restrained by Tom, who remarked that there were some things not done in decent families, and placed her forcibly in a long chair on the veranda with a new book.
'Possum came through the house presently. A feeling that something was due to a day which evidently meant far more to the Macleods than it had ever done to her, had induced her to put on her new dungaree dress, and she was stiffly uncomfortable. Dungaree obligingly fades as soon as it is washed: when new it is a rather deep hard blue, and the wearer looked hot and red-faced, and crackled as she walked. She stood in the doorway looking down at Aileen, who had put on a white frock in honour of Christmas, and, with her shining hair against the pale green canvas of her long chair, was like the spirit of spring and coolness. She put up a slim hand and took 'Possum's work-roughened one.
"I'm too lazy to get up, 'Possum," she said. "Come and sit down."
"It ain't often one sees you lazy," 'Possum answered, leaning back in a chair, and promptly sitting up again, since the position brought her great boots too baldly into view.
"I have been bullied shamefully," Aileen said, casting a severe glance at Tom, who bore it with cheerfulness. "Goodness knows my broad beans are calling for me, but I'm not allowed to go near them. What have you been doing, 'Possum?"