The Colonel came as far as Windāhgil, and even a stage further, with his daughter, to see his boy off. They were dreadfully downhearted and saddened in appearance as they called at Windāhgil on their homeward route, but cheered up a little under the attentions of sympathising friends. Hubert had remained behind, not choosing to follow for another week. He was already beginning to assume the air of a large operator and successful explorer. “Greenhaugh can do all that business as well or better than I can,” he said. “It’s no use paying a man and doing the work yourself; I can catch them up easily before they get to Banda.”
“Then we might have had Willoughby for another week,” said Miss Dacre, with a slightly reproachful air.
“I don’t suppose it would have made much difference,” admitted Hubert; “but it is perhaps as well that he made the start with the sheep. He has a larger lot to look after; I don’t know but that it’s as well to have the wrench at once, and get it over—like a double tooth, you know.”
“It’s the most philosophical way to look at it,” said the girl, smiling through her tears, “and no tongue can tell the comfort it has been to us to know that matters are in a comparatively favourable train. I must not weary you with protestations, but papa and I can never adequately express our gratitude.”
“That could be done easily enough,” thought the young man; but he said: “At present it’s only a case of good intentions; we must wait to see how they turn out. How will you and the Colonel get on by yourselves?”
“Better than I at first thought; Willoughby left us our working overseer, who will do excellently to look after a smaller number of sheep. It will just give papa exercise, and occupation to help him to manage them, he says. Laura and Linda must be good neighbours, and perhaps Mr. Stamford will come over now and then and indulge papa with a game of whist.”
“I will undertake everything,” said Hubert, “for our people, but you and the Colonel must reciprocate. If both families make common cause till ‘Johnny comes marching home’—I mean Willoughby—you will find the time pass more quickly than you anticipate.”
Those last days of a pleasant holiday time, what an element of sadness pervades them. How swiftly they fly! Ah, me! The flowers fade, the sky clouds over as if at the touch of an untoward magician. The land of faery recedes—the region of plain prose, of arduous effort, and heroic but dreary self-abnegation looms painfully near. Much, however, of this sombre aspect of the inevitable is relieved in early youth by the kindly glamour of high hope, and the ardent imagination of the as yet successful aspirant. For him the forest gloom is but the high road to the castle of the enchanted princess; the sternest tourney is more than recompensed by the smiles of his queen of beauty; the burning summer day, the drear winter night, but aids to fortune and accessories to boundless wealth.
So, for Barrington Hope and Hubert Stamford, the tranquil days came and went, scarce tinged with melancholy, till the fateful morn of departure arrived; before noon Windāhgil was left desolate and forsaken of its heroes. Hubert fared forth along the north-west trail, bound for the sea-like plains of the Lower Warroo, where the wild orange flowers bloom on their lonely sand islands, bright with glossy-leaved shrubs; where the emu rears her brood undisturbed under the sad-hued myall, that waves her slender streamers and whispers ghost-like at midnight to the pitiless desert moon.