“We had a good journey back, though it wasn’t half as interesting in the train as it was in the car. The Ryans had all the place in beautiful order. They are still here, but the Relief Committee is going to fix them up with a new sawmill soon, and they say they will be just as well-off as they were before the fire. I don’t know how well-off that was, but it seems to satisfy them. The boys will talk now, and the baby is beautiful. So are Roany and Bessy and the calf.
“Everyone asks after you, and Danny came over and showed me your gun. Why didn’t you ever tell me that you gave it to him after the fire? He is terribly proud of it, and expects to make a large fortune out of rabbit-skins.
“All the country is green again, except for the blackened trees. They look dreadful, but everyone is so glad to be alive that nobody worries. And lots of them will sprout out—the trees, I mean, not the people.
“The Merritts say that Mother and I are quite fat, so that shows what a splendid time you gave us in Town. I always hated Town until this time, but now I love it, and I’m ever so glad Mrs. Lane has asked me to go again some day. The worst part of it is that one can’t go about there in breeches and a shirt; but I suppose everything has to have its drawbacks.
“Now I have a perfectly wonderful piece of news, which I left to the last on purpose, because it’s so exciting. After you wrote to Mr. Merritt and told him the sad story of the gelignited pig (I had to pause while I looked up gelignite—I thought it began with a j)—he went down one day and had a look at the place where we blasted the rock, just out of curiosity. You know where the big stone split off from the face of the hill—I said the rock looked pretty, and you said that was just what a girl would say. Well, it was pretty, Mr. Barry, and it is pretty still. And it has every right to be pretty, because it’s marble!
“Mr. Merritt knew a good bit about marble, because he used to work in a quarry, and he hadn’t any doubt: but rather than excite our hopes he said nothing, but he sent a lot of samples to Melbourne and had them examined. And the report was better than he had hoped it would be. And then he got an expert down, a man he could trust, to look into the matter, keeping it all very quiet. But the expert says there is no doubt at all, and that it will probably be a most valuable quarry, and bring us in heaps of money. So we won’t have to look three times at a penny next time we want to spend it.
“I have always wondered what I would do if I had a lot of money, and now that there seems a chance of it, I really don’t know. I want a car, of course, and some really topping horses, though Mother won’t promise that we’ll ever get them. But best of all is knowing that Mother won’t look worried any more. And next best is the thought that I shan’t have to go away from Hill Farm and learn shorthand and typing. How dreadful that prospect was no one could ever know.
“Just fancy if old Uncle Donald had known that wealth was shut up in one of his hills! And if he could have guessed that the red-haired niece he couldn’t stand would go out with a rude little boy from Melbourne and use his own old gelignite to find it! But he’d never have had any fun with it, and I’m sure we’ll have lots. We’re going to begin by getting some poor little youngsters from Melbourne, who have been sick, and have only slum-homes to go back to, when they leave hospital. I’m sure they will like it. But I’ll make quite certain they don’t find any gelignite!
“Mr. Merritt says that he thinks his pig was very lucky to die when it did. So do I. But he is ever so pleased with the two little pure-bred Berkshires you sent him. I have offered him the first slab of marble as a suitable monument for the pig we slew. You might think up a poetical inscription.
“And don’t forget to come next summer, Barry, because, even with the marble quarry and all the excitement, it’s dull without you.