"Tom! What do you mean?"
"Just what I say. Gordon has a boy on a three-years' lease from an orphanage in Melbourne, and only six months of it have run, so I've taken him over. He's about fourteen, and quite full of wickedness. But one may train him into something."
"Did he—did he look at all clean?"
"He did not. I rather think the training will begin with soap; and it will be a terrible shock to him, because you'd say from his appearance that he'd never met it. His name is Horace, I suppose, but old Gordon always called him Horrors, and I think we'll stick to it; it's extraordinarily suitable."
"I don't think he sounds nice," said Aileen, wrinkling her pretty nose.
"To tell you the truth," said her husband confidentially, "he isn't. But he'll do a lot of odd jobs. I made inquiries about a servant, but it's as we thought—not a soul to be had. Did you sound Julia about coming?"
"I did," said Aileen. "'Is it me?' said Julia, 'that 'ud be leavin' Melbourne to go to wan of them places I've heard tell of—nowhere to go on your night out, and never a man to see, not if it was even a butcher-boy! I lived in a bog in Ireland all me days till I come to Australia; and 'tis no longer the counthry that I'd work in, but a good town with moving pictures and the grocer callin' every day for orders!' Then she wept at leaving me, and said she loved me as if I was her mother. Annie weeps too, at intervals, but of course she won't leave the young man in the baker's shop. But we couldn't afford them, anyway, Tom, so what's the good of worrying? Stop worrying at once, and tell me more about the farm."
"There's a gorgeous cloth-of-gold rose tumbling all over the veranda," he said obediently, "and lots of nice common flowers in the garden—stocks, and wallflowers, and snapdragons, and honesty, and pinks, and things like that. It's very untidy, but quite pretty. The house is in a sheltered place where anything will grow: he has orange and lemon trees, covered with fruit, and he says the lemons bear all the year round. There are guavas, too: I didn't know they grew in Victoria."
"Glory!" said Aileen, quoting her son. "I'll make guava jelly!"
"Do you know how?"