“Oh, wouldn’t it!” I cried.
“I’d like to see it a ballroom,” he said, putting his keys into his pocket, and leading the way out to the verandah. “I want to see young people round me, Doris: the place is altogether too lonely and silent. I’ll clear all the beasts out before the next holidays, and you and Madge and Colin must come down here and we’ll fill the house with cheery boys and girls. I think we could manage a pretty good time, don’t you?”
“It sounds too good to be true!” I answered. “But I would love to think it might happen.”
“We’ll make it happen,” Dr. Firth said. “You three are to be my property, in a way; you’re the nearest approach to nieces and nephews that I have—and, indeed, I don’t believe that any nieces and nephews of my own could have been as much to me as Denis’s children.” He put me into a comfortable chair. “Now you have got to tell me all about him,” he said. “I never could hear too much of Denis.”
I certainly could never have grown weary of talking. It seemed to bring Father very near to be telling everything about him to this man whom he had loved: who sat, leaning forward in his chair, letting his pipe go out as he listened. I told him how dear and good Father had been to us after Mother had died, when Madge was a very little girl: how, busy as he was, he had always made time to be with us, and had set himself to make our home what Mother would have liked it to be—a place of love and happiness. I told him of our camping-out holidays in the bush; of the half-hour before bed-time that he always kept free for us; of how he used to come to tuck us in, when we were in bed, and say “God bless you,” just as Mother would have done. There were so many dear and merry memories of which it was happiness to tell. It was not so easy to speak of the last dreadful days, when we had all, in our bewilderment, been unable to realize that he was going away from us for ever.
“But he did not know, himself,” I said. “It was all so quick: unconsciousness came so soon. We have always been thankful that he did not know.”
“I wish I had been there,” Dr. Firth said. “You three children, to face everything!”
He walked up and down for a few minutes saying nothing. Then he came back and put his hand on my shoulder.
“You seem to have faced things like men, at all events,” he said. “And in future, you have got to count me in: I’m not going to lose you, now that I have found you. When you go back to Melbourne I mean to go too, to make friends with Colin and Madge. Colin and I used to be friends, years ago. He was a great little boy: the kind of boy a man would like to have for a son.”
“He is certainly the kind of boy we like to have for a brother,” I said, laughing. “Why, even his name helps to keep Judy and Jack McNab in order!”