Page:Coo-ee - tales of Australian life by Australian ladies.djvu/127

Rh out; it is hers by Divine right, and she is in duty bound to collect it.

So as Clive Pomfret's eyes appealed to me, and as I saw directly he was as weak as a reed, I made up my mind to be his friend; and indeed I had him deep down in a good hot discussion that had a slight flavour of ethics in it--boys like that sort of thing--before he knew what he was about, and we were already bons camarades, when suddenly the step-sister swooped softly down and scattered us.

'Clive,' she said, with an artless glance out of her big blue eyes,--were they blue, by the way, or grey, or green? I never found out, no more did any one else,--'they want you for tennis, dear, and I'll take care of Mrs. Vallings.'

We were on a garden-seat in the shadow of a Norfolk pine watching the players, and she sat down beside me in Mr. Pomfret's place. I looked pleased--I couldn't well look any other way--and prepared to find out her age,--a much harder matter than I imagined, it altered so. She was sometimes sixty and sometimes sixteen; she was never a girl all the same,--there was an unsound look of age and experience in that person that belied her soft girlish exterior, and baffled me.

She had an alluringly musical voice, and she spoke with much gesture.

It was a perfect day, cool and fresh and sparkling, with the sunlight embracing and glorifying all things, even the ugly gums, and yet with a touch of the frost