Page 67 - An Australian Lassie

She ran most of the way to the store, which, it may be remembered, occupied the corner, just before you come
to Wygate School.

As Betty came in sight of it she saw John standing still there, and she thought gratefully how good it was of
him to wait for her.

He wore a very old and very baggy suit, a dirty torn straw hat (of which it must be owned he had plenty), and
neither boots nor stockings.

The children eyed each other carefully, noting every detail, and both in their own heart admiring the other
exceedingly.

Betty's face had lost its traces of tears, but had not got back its happy look. Her mouth drooped sadly.

"What's up?" asked John as they turned their faces towards the silent south.

"Tt hurts me, leaving the little ones," said Betty, who was now in imagination Madam S— . "You have no
brothers and sisters to provide for."

John sighed. "No," he said, "T've no one but an old grandfather, and he grudges me every crust T eat. He's cut
me off with a shilling."

For a space Betty was envious. For a space she liked John's imagination better than her own. That "cutting off
with a shilling" seemed to her very fine.

He showed her his shilling. "T've that," he said, "to begin life on. Many a fellow would starve on it. I'm going
to make my fortune with it."

They were the words one of his heroes had spoken, and sounded splendid to both.

"T've sixpence-halfpenny," said Betty, and unclosed her little brown hand for a second. "That's all!"

They walked on. Tn front of them and behind ran the dusty road, like a red line dividing a still bush world.
Overhead was a tender sky, grey stealing shyly away to give place to a soft still blue. Already the daylight was
wakening others than these foolish barefooted waifs. Here and there a frog uttered its protest against, mayhap,
the water it had discovered, or been born to; the locusts lustily prophesied a hot day. Occasionally an
industrious rabbit travelled at express speed from the world on one side of the red road to the world on the
other. And above all this bustle and business and frivolity rang the brazen laugh of a company of kookaburras,
who were answering each other from every corner of the bush.

After some little travelling the fortune seekers came upon a cottage standing alone in a small bush-clearing on
their right. Three cows stood chewing their cud, and waiting to be milked, a scattering of fowls was shaking
off dull sleep, and making no little ado about it, and near the door a shock-headed youth was rubbing both
eyes with both hands.

Betty and John walked on. These signs of awakening life roused them to a livelier sense of being alive.

Yet a little further and they came to what Betty always called a "calico" cottage, which is to say, a cottage
made of scrim, and white-washed. Windows belonged to it, and a door, and a garden enclosed by a brushwood
fence.

"Let's peep in the gate," said Betty, "it's such a sweet little house."