Page:Coo-ee - tales of Australian life by Australian ladies.djvu/123

Rh But the woman! she looked artless and blooming, and her dimples might have been filched from a baby; but somehow I saw, in her swift, comprehensive, amused glance at me, that the girl in that young person was dead, or perhaps had never lived.

She was fresh to look at--fresh and dainty and soft; but there was a certain sweet mellowness in her glance,—of a sort that always staggers another woman, and puts her at a disadvantage,—a certain air of 'having gone the whole round of creation' and taken it all in, moreover, that is peculiarly trying, especially when one has lived and also 'experienced' in one's own humble line: under that glance I might have been still looking out at life from over the nursery blinds.

This look, I found later, was not habitual to her; and why she let our acquaintance begin by it, I never could find out. Some sudden incontrollable freak of diablerie I believe it must have been. When we had taken each other in, they went to the south of the platform, I to the north. Suddenly the sound of swift-rolling wheels caught my ear, and I looked over the fence eagerly. A big lumbering waggonette was thundering up the hill behind two powerful horses. I could just catch sight of two girls' heads crowed with brown deer-stalkers, and a middle-aged bonnet. Before I was half down the platform, my mother's old friend (whom I remembered quite well) and her two tall daughters were welcoming me, and apologising all at once. Then their eyes fell instinctively to criticising my turn-out, in an off-hand, good-humoured way,