Page 16 - An Australian Lassie

away"--Betty to her bedroom to make her preparations, and Cyril (who was strictly forbidden even to peep
through the key-hole) to the dark passage that ran from the bedrooms to the dining-room and front door. He
went on with his plans while he waited. All day he had been thinking of the rainbow coloured future Betty
assured him was his. He had quite decided to leave school directly he was adopted, and to have "some one"
come to teach him at home. Of course his grandfather would not be able to bear him out of his sight. He had
heard of such cases, and supposed he was about to become one. Then he decided to have a pony, a nice quiet
little thing with a back not too far from the ground; and he would have a boat and sail her where the coral
islands were, and he would have a few new marbles--and get his grandfather to have the emus killed.

He had just arrived at the part of the story where his grandfather was giving orders for the destruction of his
emus, when Betty opened the bedroom door a crack, and whispered his name.

She shut the door at once, before he was fairly inside the room, and then he saw her.

Such a strange new Betty she was, that he almost cried out. Her face was white--white as death; two black
cork lines stood for eyebrows, and black lines lay under her eyes, making them larger and unnatural-looking.
She wore a black gown of her mother's, and a black capacious bonnet, and had a rusty dog chain tied to one
arm. She moved her arm and fixed her eyes on her startled brother.

"Do you hear my clanking chain?" she asked in what she fondly believed to be "sepulchral tones." "Ghosts
always have them. Come on."

But Cyril hung back somewhat--perhaps the glories of "being adopted" paled beside the unpleasantness of
walking a lonely road in such unusual company.

"Tt's--it's a silly game," he said. "T don't see any good in it at all."

But the little ghost turned upon him spiritedly.

"This isn't a game at all," she said. "This is real. Tt'll make mother friends with grandfather, and get you
adopted. Get baby and come on--it might frighten her if she saw me."

"They'll find out that she's gone," said Cyril, still leaning upon the bed-foot and eyeing his sister distrustfully.
"Let's chuck it, Betty, we'll only get in a row."

"We won't get in a row," said Betty staunchly. "She'll be only too glad when we come back and tell them all. T
didn't undress Baby to-night, and T put on her blue sash and everything. All you've to do is to wrap that shawl
round her and catch me up. T'll be at the gate."

Baby was used, as were all of the others except Dot, to an open-air existence. Most of her daylight hours were
spent, either rolling on the rough lawn, or sleeping in a hammock swung beneath an apple tree, and as a result,
night-tide found her a very drowsy baby indeed. The children might romp and sing and chatter around her
very cot as she slept, but she could not steal out of her slumbers even to blink a golden eyelash at them.

So that when Cyril overtook Elizabeth at the gate, my Lady Baby was asleep in his arms, and so she stayed in
spite of the thumping of his heart, and the chatter of the ghost, and the rough road.

The night was dark with the luminous darkness of an Australian summer night. The tender sky was scattered
with star-dust, a baby-moon peeped over the hill-top and the leaves and branches of the great bush trees lay
like dark fretwork over the heavens.

Betty, holding her dress well up, and Cyril carrying the sleeping baby, hurried through the belt of bush that