galvanised iron.

Inside there were chiefly pictures, great canvases on which Thetis was rising from a roughly tossing sea, her infant Achilles laughing in her arms; on which the lofty mountain Pindus towered, the Muses seated about in negligent attitudes; on which delicious twists and turns of the River Thames flowed; on which wet, cool beaches glistened, and shallow waves lapped idly.

There was also a piano with a mountain of music. Also a few chairs and a table.

Bartie dragged off the saddle and harness, flung them on the verandah, and turned Tramby loose among the sheep. Then he went into the house.

There rose up listlessly from the doorstep and a book an exquisitely pretty girl of seventeen, a girl with sea-blue eyes and a skin that Wilgandra could in no wise account for, so soft and fresh and pure it was. You saw the same face again and again in the canvasses about the room, sweetest as Isis, with the tender, anxious look of motherhood in her eyes, and Horus in her arms. This was Hermie.

'Have you got the mail?' she asked.

Bartie nodded.

'Go and fetch father,' he said; 'he's down with the roses, I saw his hat moving.'

He flung himself on the ground, listless with the heat; Floss dragged off her hot frock and her shoes, and revelled in the pleasure of her little petticoat and bare feet. Roly looked plaintively at the table, on which was no cloth as yet.

'Miss Browne,' he called, the very tears in his voice, 'Miss Browne, isn't tea ready?'

A faded spinster, lady-help to the family for six years, came hurrying into the room.

'Poor Roly!' she said. 'Yes, it is too bad of me, dear; I was mending your best jacket, and didn't notice the time. But I'll soon have it ready now.' She ran hastily about the room looking for the cloth, and at last remembered she had put it under the piano-lid, to be out of the dust. She put on the vases of exquisite roses that Hermie had arranged, and a wild collection of odd china and crockery cups and enamelled ware.

Then she noticed the rent of extraordinary dimensions in Bartie's coat, the same jagged place that had made even Peter Small exclaim.

'Dear, dear,' she said, 'this will never do. This really must not go a moment longer. Where is my thimble? Where can I have put my thimble? Give me that coat, Bartie, this minute, if you please.

Bartie took it off, but sat with jealous eye upon it all the time it was in her hands. He would have it mended his way.

'Now, look here,' he said, 'please don't go putting any fresh stuff in it. Just sew it over and over, so the places come together. I'll take to mending my own clothes. It's just the way you go letting new pieces in that spoils your mending, Miss Browne.'

'But, Bartie dear,' the gentle lady said, 'see, my love, when a place is torn right away like this, we have to put fresh stuff underneath. I'll just get a tiny bit from my work-basket.'

'You just won't,' said Bartie stubbornly. 'You give it to me, and I'll mend it myself'—and he actually took the needle and cotton and cobbled it over till there certainly was no hole left.

'Now, my love,' he said, and held it up triumphantly.

'But it will break away again to-morrow,' said Miss Browne, in deep distress. 'If you would just let me put a little patch, Bartie.'

But Bartie clung to his coat.

Roly had strayed out to look at his kangaroo-rats, but now came back.

The tears came to his voice again at the sight of Miss Browne, sitting with her thimble on, looking helplessly at Bartie.

'Oh dear,' he said, 'isn't there never going to be any tea?'

'You poor little fellow!' she said. 'Just one minute more, Roly dear. You can be sitting down.'

Hermie had gone flying across the ground to a place in the eighty acres where the ground dipped into a little valley. It was all fenced round with wire, to keep off the fowls and sheep. Within there grew roses in such beauty and profusion as to astonish one. She saw a very old cabbage-tree hat bending over a bush, and darted towards it.

'Dad,' she said, 'dad darling, come along in; the mail has come.'

There rose up a man, grey as his own selection, a man not more than five-and-forty. Eyes blue as Hermie's own looked from under his grey eyebrows, a grey beard covered his mouth.

'The mail, did you say, little woman?' he said, and stopped to prune just one more shoot here, and snip off just one more drooping blossom.

'And tea, too, darling; at least I suppose it will be ready some day. Come along, you are very tired, daddie. Why did you start ploughing a day like this?'

The man sighed.

'It had to be done, girlie; but see, I gave myself a reward. I have been down here an hour. Now let us go and read our letters.'

As they reached the living-room they found Miss Browne dusting the piano and tidying the music; the setting of the table was advanced one stage further, that is, the knives and forks were now on.

Roly came up again from another visit to his rats.

'Miss Browne,' he said, 'oh dear, oh dear!'—and stalked off to the kitchen, to demand of Lizzie, the young State girl who scrubbed and washed for them, where was the corned beef for tea, and wasn't there any butter?

But the father was tearing open the letters. Hermie and Bartie hung over his shoulder, reading just as eagerly as he. Floss crouched between his knees to catch the crumbs. Roly, munching while he waited at a hunch of ill-coloured bread, kept an eye and an ear for any spoken news, and Miss Browne moved continually about the room, straightening chairs, altering the position of the table vases, rearranging the knives and forks.

Mr. Cameron looked up, and drew forward a chair next to his own.

'Do sit down, Miss Browne,' he said; 'I am sure you are very tired. Sit down, and let us enjoy this all together.'

So Miss Browne, too, joined the circle, Roly watching her with a brooding eye.

'WINDSOR CASTLE.

'OH, MY DEAR ONES, MY DEAR ONES' ran the white letter,—'Is the earth shaking beneath me, have my hands ague, that my pen trembles like this? We are coming home, home, home. No false reports this time, no heart-sickening disappointment; the papers are actually signed for a long season, and we leave by the Utopia in six weeks. The news came an hour ago. I saw an equerry coming in with the letters, saw the letter that meant so much carried up to my room by a house steward, and had to pass along the corridor and leave it. Challis was going down to play to the Queen in her private sitting-room. But after it all was over how we went to our rooms again! There was only a chambermaid in sight, and for the last twenty yards of corridor we ran. Home, home, home, to your arms, my husband, my dear one, my patient old sweetheart! Home to my little girls, my boys, my