“That’s him!” she cries. “I hear him coming now!”
The child rushes out to the verandah, and again shades her eyes with her hand. Through the sunlight, across the cleared space of grass which surrounds the station, a horse and rider are coming. With the sunny glare in her eyes, it is not until he is quite near that Ruby sees that the approaching figure really is her father. Strangers do not come often to Glengarry; but it so chances that now and again a stray traveller on his way to the coast claims the hospitality of the station.
He swings off his horse at the garden-gate, flings the reins to Dick, the stable-boy, and stoops to kiss the face of the little girl who has run out to meet him.
“I thought you were just never coming, dad,” complains Ruby, plaintively. “And Jenny’s afraid the pudding’ll be spoilt. It’s been ready ever so long.”
“Here I am at last anyway, little woman,” laughs the big man, whose brown eyes are so like Ruby’s, and whose voice is the sweetest sound in the world to his little daughter.
He goes into the house, with the child hanging upon his arm, her big eyes gazing up at him, reflecting every smile in the dear face above her. The love between those two is a very beautiful thing, like that sweet old-fashioned love of which we read, that it was “passing that of women.”
“I thought you were never coming, Will,” says his wife, giving vent to her thoughts in the same words as Ruby. “You do look hot, and no wonder; for it is hot enough even in here. And I have such a headache.”
“Poor little Dolly!”
Surely a shade of regret passes over the bronzed face as he strokes the soft golden hair with his big rough hand. He is reproaching himself that he has not been unselfish enough, as many a man has, to face the battle alone, instead of bringing this fragile little Dolly of his away from the dear “kent faces” of the land where she was born, to brave the rough life and hardships of the Australian bush. And before his eyes uprises another face—a young, bright, dauntless face, with fearless grey eyes—the face of Ruby’s mother, who would have gone through fire and water for the sake of the man she loved; but who, in her quiet Scottish home, had not been called upon to do any great thing, only to leave her husband and child when the King called her away to that other land which is fairer even than the dearly loved bonnie Scotland she left behind.
It is no one’s fault that the wrong woman seems to have been put in the wrong place, that the fearless Scottish lassie who would fain have proved her love for her husband by braving peril and hardship for his sake, had comfortable circumstances and a peaceful life for her lot, and that the fair-faced, ease-loving woman who came after her should have had to brave those very hardships which the first had coveted.