Melbourne again! which—so accommodating is our mental to our bodily vision—seemed quite a small London after Ballarat and Growlers'.
Mrs. Vernon, who was just about organising one of her regular winter parties, hailed Estelle's arrival with unaffected joy. This was rather dashed when she understood her guest's intention to depart for Omeo at the earliest possible moment. If the truth must be told, she considered the discovery of Lance's abiding-place at Omeo to be an unalloyed misfortune. This view of the case was of course unexpressed, out of deference to Estelle's feelings, who made it—the announcement—with such unfeigned pleasure that her hostess could not, for pity's sake, forbear the conventional words of sympathy.
'But, my dear, you cannot possibly go to that dreadful Omeo at present, if indeed at all. It was only yesterday that I heard Mr. Vernon telling some young man (a young man, my dear!) that he advised him to wait till the winter was nearly over before he started for Omeo, as the roads were positively dangerous.'
'I will wait any reasonable time, and I shall certainly be guided by Mr. Vernon's kind advice,' the girl said; 'but I am resolved to reach Omeo before the spring.'
'"A wilful woman,"' quoted the old lady, '"must, I suppose, have her way," like a wilful man, but I am charmed to see that you recognise the propriety of consulting Mr. Vernon. He has business relations with Omeo—what they are I have not the faintest idea—mining requisites, I presume—everything from picks and shovels to pianos and cornopeans—so that he will know how to manage the transport service for you. And now, my dear, come and see your room.'
Mrs. Vernon's home was enticing. A roomy, well-furnished modern house, the upper windows of which commanded a far-reaching view of the waters of the harbour and the bluffs and headlands trending easterly towards a dim and mighty forest world, beyond which again rose mountain peaks. A broad verandah protected it equally from winter rain and summer heat. The gardens, filled with exotics of every land, sloped down, with winding walks amid trim grass lawns and thickets of ornamental shrubs, to the waters of the Yarra. Exclusive enough for meditation and rambling walks, beautiful also with the carefully-guarded flowers which the half-tropical summer and mild winter of the south permit to develop in rarest beauty, had Estelle desired a restful retreat wherein to stay her pilgrim feet for a season, no pleasanter spot, no more alluring bower, could she have found. But such loitering in the path of duty, synonymous in her case with the passion around which the tendrils of her heart—the heart of a self-controlled, habitually reserved woman—entwined, was not for Estelle Chaloner. Pleased and grateful as she could not fail to be with Mrs. Vernon's motherly warmth and kindly tendance, she told herself that she would rather have been in a stagecoach, rumbling along the roughest road towards Omeo, the goal of all her thoughts and aspirations, than playing her part mechanically among the pleasant society people seated around Mr. Vernon's handsomely appointed dinner-table.
As for that gentleman himself, he vied with his wife in welcoming his prodigal daughter, as he persisted in calling her.
'We have adopted you, my dear Miss Chaloner; ask Mrs. Vernon if we haven't. We wept till bedtime after your departure, didn't we, Mary? and now that our daughter that we lost is found, what do I hear about her going away again? It can't be done. It's against Scripture; ask Mr. Chasuble here if it isn't. The fatted calf is doomed, and she must stay for the feast.'
'I daresay you won't find me an undutiful daughter,' she replied smilingly, 'but you must wait till I have returned from the wilderness before feasting will be appropriate. I have seen little or nothing, so far, of the rude and lawless waste I was led to expect—on the contrary, refinement and courtesy seem indigenous to Australia.'
'Oh! that's all very fine,' laughed back Mrs. Vernon; 'you've been spoiled at Ballarat, but you mustn't expect to find the country full of handsome Goldfields Commissioners, six feet high, and crammed full of accomplishments—like Mr. Dalton, or even Mr. Annesley, whom you saw here. There are places so different.'