On the second morning after Miss Grant’s arrival, that young lady turned up at breakfast in a tailor-made suit with short skirt and heavy boots, and announced her intention of “walking round the estate;” but as Kuryong—though only a small station, as stations go—was, roughly, ten miles square, this project had to be abandoned. Then she asked Hugh if he would have the servants mustered. He told her that the two servants were in the kitchen, but it turned out that she wanted to interview all the station hands, and it had to be explained that the horse-driver was six miles out on the run with his team, drawing in a load of bark to roof the hay shed, and that Harry Warden was down at the drafting yards, putting in a new trough to hold an arsenical solution, through which the sheep had to tramp to cure their feet; and that everybody else was away out on some business or other. But the young lady stuck to her point, and had the groom and the wood-and-water boy paraded, they being the only two available. The groom was an English importation, and earned her approval by standing in a rigid and deferential attitude, and saying “Yes, Miss,” and “No, Miss,” when spoken to; but the wood-and-water boy stood with his arms akimbo and his mouth open, and when she asked him how he liked being on the station he said, “Oh, it’s not too bad,” accompanying his remark with a sickly grin that nearly earned him summary dismissal.
The young lady returned to the house in rather a sharp temper, and found Hugh standing by a cart, which had just got back with her shipwrecked luggage.
“Well, Miss Grant,” he said, “the things are pretty right. The water went down in an hour or so, and the luggage on the top only got a little wetting—just a wave now and again. How have you been getting on?”
“Not at all well,” she laughed. “I don’t understand the people here. I will get you to take me round before I do another thing. It is so different from England. Are you sure my clothes are all right?”
“I can’t be sure, of course, but you can unpack them as soon as you like.”
It was not long before the various boxes were opened. Ellen Harriott was called in to assist, and the two girls had a real good afternoon, looking at and talking over clothes and jewellery. The things had come fairly well out of the coach disaster. When an English firm makes a water-tight cover for a bag or box, it _is_ water-tight; even the waters of Kiley’s River had swept over the canvas of Miss Grant’s luggage in vain. And when the sacred boxes were opened, what a treasure-trove was unveiled!