Page 13 - An Australian Lassie

drudge!"

Cyril entered the back door, his arms piled up with firewood.

"T'm getting sick of chopping wood," he said grumblingly, "it's all very well to be you and stay in a nice cool
kitchen. How'd you like it if you had to be me and stay chopping in the hot sun? T know what I wish."

"What?" asked Betty, glancing round her "nice cool kitchen" without any appreciation of it lighting her eyes.

"Why, T wish mother had never run away and made grandfather mad. And T wish he'd suddenly think he was
going to die, and say he wanted to adopt me."

"How about me? Why shouldn't he adopt me?" demanded Betty.

"'Cause T'm the only son," said Cyril. "He's got his pick of four girls, but if he wants a boy there's only me."

He went outside and loaded himself with wood once more.

"Cecil Duncan's father gives him threepence a week, and he doesn't have to do anything to earn it," he said
when he came in again. "He says every Monday morning his father gives him a threepenny bit and his
mother's always giving him pennies."

"H'em," said Cinderella, and fell to work sweeping up the hearth vigorously. Her own grievances faded away,
as she looked at Cyril's--which was a way they had.

"And he's not the only boy neither," said Cyril. He threw the wood angrily into the barrel. "There's Harry and
Jim besides. T suppose they get threepence each as well. What's a penny a week? You can't do anything with
it."

Elizabeth lifted down a tin bowl and filled it with water; placed in it a piece of yellow soap, a piece of sand
soap and a scrubbing brush, and then began to roll up her sleeves. She was no longer Cinderella. A new and
wonderful thought had flashed into her mind even as she listened to Cyril's plaint. Tt certainly was hard for
him, her heart admitted, very hard.

"How would you like to be rich, Cywil?" she asked, turning a shining face to him.

Cyril thought a reply was one of those many things that could be dispensed with--he merely showered a little
extra vindictiveness upon the firewood and kicked the cask with a shabby copper-toed boot.

Betty danced across to him and put her sun-tanned face close to his fair freckled one.

"How would you like to be very rich?" she said, "and to have a pony of your own, and jelly and things to eat,
and a lovely house to live in, and---- "

"Don't be so silly, Betty," said the boy irritably.

Betty wagged her head. "T've got a thought," she said.

"Your silly-old pearl-seeking is no good. There are no pearls, so there," said Cyril crossly. "You needn't go
thinking you really take me in. Tt's only a game--bah!"

Betty was still dancing around him in a convincing, yet aggravating way.