‘We are prejudiced,’ said Rosamond, ‘and will remain so to the end of the chapter. But I thought you were fighting against odds, with such champions as Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Clarke. Now you have won the tilt and are the favoured knight. Is the queen of beauty to give you the victor’s wreath?—and who is she?’
‘Oh, Christabel the peerless, of course,’ said Miss Fane. ‘And I think her the prettiest creature in the world—that is, for a dark beauty, of course,’ looking at Annabel, who now came up. ‘It’s a case of honours divided, all the men say.’
‘I wonder how we shall settle down in our peaceful homes again,’ said Beatrice, ‘after all these wild excitements and thrilling incidents. I feel as if we were leaving the first or second volume of a novel.’
‘Why the first or second,’ said Miss Fane, ‘and not the third?’
‘Because there’s no possibility of our story being complete in one volume. There are materials for romances here, but the _dénouement_ is wanting. Every one will go home again on Monday; the actors and actresses will throw on their wrappers, the lights will be put out, the theatre shut up, and no piece announced until next year. There is something theatrical about all pleasure. This indeed is real melodrama, with plenty of scene-shifting, comedy in proper proportion, leading actors, and a hint of tragedy in the last act.’
For the Effinghams this had been a completely new experience. Without complications of the affections, except in Wilfred’s case, a wider estimate of Australian country life had been afforded to them. Besides the squirearchy of the land, they had met specimens of the best of the younger sons whom England’s ancient houses still send, year by year, to carry her laws, her arts, her ambition, and her energy to the most distant of her possessions. These include, literally, the ends of the earth, where they may aid in the heroic work of colonisation, planting the germs of nations, and raising the foundations of empires. Such men they had among their immediate neighbours. Still it was pleasant to know that others of the same high nature and standard of culture, the Conquistadors of the South, were distributed over the entire continent.
Moreover, they had fallen across several perfect feminine treasures, as Annabel declared them to be—friends and acquaintances, most rare and valuable. Nothing could have exceeded the hospitality and thoughtful kindness of the ladies of the Rockley family. Mrs. Rockley had been unwearied in providing for the comfort of her guests, and in that congenial employment partaking as well in her own person of a reasonable share of the pleasures of the continuous _festa_, underwent such fatigue, that nothing but an unruffled temper, with great natural advantages of constitution, prevented her from breaking down hopelessly before the week was over. As it was, though there was a slight look of weariness, an air of responsibility, in the morning, the least occasion sufficed to bring the ever-cordial smile to the kind face, when all gravity of mien instantly disappeared.