"Bran is too busy nursing his master," said Garth's mother, looking at the rough head of the Irish terrier curled up on a chair beside the boy's bed. "We'll all get out together in a few days, and find out all the beautiful things that have happened in the garden since we were there. Won't it be lovely, Tom?"
She leaned back until her head touched her husband—a tall, pale girl, with lovely features and a mass of fair hair that glinted like Garth's when the sunlight fell on it, and eyes as blue as violets. Her long hands, blue-veined and delicate, lay idly in her lap, one finger keeping open the book from which she had been reading. She was like an exquisite piece of china—fragile, to all outward appearance, and dainty; graceful in every line. Tom Macleod looking down at her, felt as he had felt ten year' ago, before they married, that he must let no wind blow upon her roughly.
Now he had to tell her that they must go away, away from the ordered comfort of city life, which was all that she had ever known, to whatever the country had in store for them. Even for himself, always a townsman, the prospect carried something of dread, as do all unfamiliar prospects. But he knew that, whatever hardships the Bush holds for a man, it is hardest on a woman.
Garth was chattering away, oblivious of his father's grave face.
"Doctor says I can talk as much as I like," he proclaimed happily. "And he says I'll be perflickly well in a little bit, and then Mother can take me down to the sea. And she says she will, didn't you, Mother? And then you can come down for week-ends, Daddy. Or do you think the Office would give you a holiday, like it did the time we went to Black Rock?"
"It might," said his father.
"Do make it," Garth begged. "It would be so lovely, Daddy—and you could teach me to swim." His little thin face, for which the brown eyes were so much too large, was alight with eagerness. "Bran'll come too—he loves going away, doesn't he? D'you know, Daddy, I think Bran was just cut out for a country dog! He's so awful interested when he gets away from the streets."
"I'm not sure that that's not very good taste on Bran's part," said Macleod: and at something in his tone his wife looked up sharply. "What do you think about it yourself, Garth?"
"Oh, I just love the country," Garth answered. "You get so tired with streets—they all look alike, nothing but motors and dust. The Gardens are jolly, of course, and so's Fawkner Park; but they're not the same as the real country. D'you remember the time we went to Gippsland for the holidays? Wasn't it lovely? I always felt when we went out walking that we might meet anything whatever—fairies, or Bunyips, or—or all sorts of things!"
"But you never did, I suppose?"