“Will Jenny go too?” she inquires further.
The two elders look doubtfully at each other.
“I don’t know,” says mamma at length rather lamely. “Don’t say anything to her about it just now, Ruby, till it is quite settled.”
Quite settled! In Ruby’s mind it is quite settled already. She goes out to the verandah after dinner, and, swinging idly in the hammock, indulges in the luxury of dreaming. Above her stretches the cloudless blue of the Australian sky, for miles on her every hand lie the undulations of Australian bush; but Ruby is far away from it all, away in bonnie Scotland, with its rippling burns and purple heather, away in the land where her mother lived and died, and where Ruby’s own baby eyes first opened.
“It’s about too good to be true,” the little girl is thinking. “It’s like dreaming, and then you waken from the dream and find it’s all just a make-up. What if this was a dream too?”
It is not a dream, as Ruby finds after she has dealt herself several sharp pinches, her most approved method of demonstrating to herself that reality really is reality. No dream, she has found by experience, can long outlast such treatment.
But by-and-by even reality passes into dreaming, and Ruby goes to sleep, the rippling of the creek in her ears, and the sunshine of the Christmas afternoon falling aslant upon her face.
In her dreams the splash of the creek is transformed into the babble of a Highland burn over the stones, and the sunshine is the sunshine of dear, unknown, bonnie Scotland.