“Splendid!” said Linda. “They have beautiful coats too, which I did not expect. They’re not quite so aristocratic in demeanour as Mr. Grandison’s carriage horses, but they can trot about double as fast, I daresay.”
“They look very different to what they did this time last year,” said Hubert, running his eye over the middle-sized, well-bred, wiry pair. “Do you remember poor old Whalebone tumbling down—Whipcord was nearly as bad—as we were driving to church, from sheer weakness?”
“Oh! yes,” said Linda; “we had to tie up the pole of the buggy with our pocket-handkerchiefs; poor old dear! He looks as if he could pull one’s arms off now.”
Once fairly off behind the fourteen-mile-an-hour buggy horses, spinning along the smooth bush road—the best wheel track in the world in good weather and in a dry country, that is, its normal state—the spirits of the party rose several degrees. Mr. Stamford and his wife were calmly happy at the idea of returning to their quiet home life, having had enough of the excitement of city and suburb for a while. The girls were continually exclaiming, as each new turn of the road brought them within sight of well-remembered spots and familiar points of the landscape, while Hubert, much too happy to talk, kept looking at his relatives, one by one, with an air of intense, overflowing affection.
“It’s worth all the loneliness to have you back again,” he said, patting his mother’s cheek; “but it was horribly dismal for a time. I felt as if I could have left the run in charge of the boundary-riders, only for shame, and run down to Sydney myself. Fortunately, Laura wrote so regularly that I seemed to know what you were doing and saving, as well as almost everything you thought.”
“I wrote too, I’m sure,” said Linda, with an injured air.
“Well, you were more spasmodic. Though I was very glad to get your letters too. I acquired a deal of information about the ‘Queen’s Navee,’ in which department I was weak. However, I suppose it’s as well to know everything.”
“I’m sure you are most ungrateful,” pouted Linda, “If you only knew how hard it is to write!”
“Oh, ho! quoting from Lord Sandwich’s lines:—
‘To all you ladies now on land