’Yes, look at my elbows,’ Roly said; and though the positions forbade this, a mental picture of the clumsy mending with stuff worlds too new rose up before the eyes of his brother and sister.
Floss was dressed with curious inequality; she wore heavy country shoes and stockings, like the rest of the children at that public school, and her bonnet was of calico and most primitive manufacture, but her frock was exquisite—a little Paris-made garment of fine cashmere, beautifully embroidered.
’I wish some more of Challis’s frocks would come,’ she sighed; ’this one’s so hot. I wish mamma would make her always wear thin things.’
’Think how cold it is in Paris and those places!’
’Think how hot it is here!’ sighed Floss and mopped at her streaming little face with her disengaged hand.
’I got the mail,’ Bartie said, and pulled two letters out of his pocket—a thick one from his almost-forgotten mother, and a pale blue with a fanciful C upon the flap from his twin sister; they both bore the postmark of Windsor.
’Suppose they’re stopping with the Queen again,’ he added laconically.
’Wonder what they have for tea at her house?’ sighed Flossie, and her system revolted against the corned beef and ill-made bread that were in prospect for her own meal.
Tramby turned of her own accord at a sudden gap in the gum-trees, and stood alongside while Roly stretched and contorted himself to lift out the sliprail—nothing ever induced him to dismount for this task. Then she stepped daintily over the lower rail, and again waited while the passenger in the rear stretched down and made things safe again.
Their father’s selection stretched before them, eighty acres of miserable land, lying grey and dreary under the canopy of a five o’clock coppery sky, summer and drought time.
Patches of fertility showed some one laboured at the place. There was a stretch of lucerne, green as any in the district. But this was not saying very much, for Wilgandra’s vegetation as a rule copied the neutral tint of the gum-trees, rather than the vivid emerald so pleasant to the eye in country wilds.
There was a small patch under potatoes, there were half a dozen orange-trees, yellow with fruit. At the very door of the house a cow grazed calmly, and everywhere browsed the sheep, brown, ragged, dirty things, fifty or sixty of them, far more than the acreage should have carried, but still in good condition—it seemed as if the mortgage was fattening. The house was a poor weatherboard place, the paint blistered off, the windows rickety, the roof of cruel galvanised iron.