"I don't like to speak harshly to you, my dear," Mrs. Hardy proceeded, in a rather more gentle, but still irritated tone. "Only you _must_ not vex me with such absurd and childish notions. I know it is only a pa.s.sing whim--you are over-tired, and you are hurt because Mr. Kingston paid Miss Hale so much attention, though it is only what he does to all women, without meaning anything whatever; but still it is a serious and horrible thing--breaking an engagement, a really happy engagement, as yours is--jilting a kind, good man, after giving him every encouragement--even to _think_ of! Don't let me hear you mention it again, unless you want to break my heart altogether. And after all I have done for you--I don't want to boast, but I _have_ been a good aunt to you, Rachel, and you would have been in a poor place but for me--the least you can do is to respect my wishes, especially as you know I wish nothing but what is for your real good and welfare."

Rachel wandered back to her bed, laid her head gently on the pillow, and closed her eyes. Mrs. Hardy in the dead silence that presently ensued, was relieved to think that she had "settled off" at last; but it was not sleep that kept her so quiet--it was the calmness of defeat and despair.

CHAPTER V.

RACHEL'S FIRST VISIT IN MELBOURNE.

In the last week of August, when the place was looking its loveliest--the rustic gables of the pretty house all hung with wistaria, and the shrubberies full of fragrant bushes of purple and white lilac--Mrs. Hardy, Mr. Kingston, and Rachel took their departure from Adelonga. It was to one of them a truly heart-breaking business.

Rachel stood on the verandah while the horses were being put to, clasping Lucilla and the baby alternately to her heart, and wept without restraint, until her eyes were swollen, and her delicate colour resolved into unbecoming red patches, and there was scarcely a trace of her beauty and brightness left.

No one but herself was at all able to realise what this moment cost her.

She was not only leaving a place where she had spent the happiest period of her youth; not only parting from friends with whom she had established the most tender and sympathetic relations; she was closing a chapter, or rather a brief pa.s.sage, which was the one inspired poem of her life; and she was saying good-bye to Hope.

As long as she was at Adelonga, there was the chance that Mr. Dalrymple might come back--at any rate, notwithstanding the Queensland arrangements, there was a constant impression that he was near. And as long as she was at Adelonga she had felt bold to strive, by various feeble and ineffectual devices, to extricate herself from her engagement.

Now she was going where it seemed to her her lover would never be allowed to reach her, and where in a hard world of money and fashion, and under the terrible dominion of "the house," she would be a helpless victim in the hands of Fate.

"Good-bye, darling Lucilla!" she sobbed; "thank you so much--I have been so happy here--I am so sorry to go away!"

The gentle woman was inexpressibly touched, and of course cried for company. Mrs. Hardy had her own maternal reluctance to face an indefinite term of separation from her daughter. And altogether Mr.

Kingston was not without justification for his unusually irritable frame of mind.

He did not like to see women crying; he was particularly annoyed that Rachel should exercise so little command over herself, and that she should have red eyes and a swollen nose; and he was uneasy about the untoward episode which had been the first hitch in the smooth current of his engagement, and wondered whether it could be possible that a lingering fancy for that Dalrymple fellow was making her so unwilling to return to her Melbourne life.

Moreover, he hated country travelling--long drives over rough bush roads, and bivouacs at country inns, where the food was badly cooked and the wine detestable; and he was suspicious about the behaviour of the Adelonga horses, whose little traits of character came out rather strongly in the invigorating air of spring; and he had a nasty touch of gout.

However, the day was fine, and the drive was lovely. As she was carried along, with the soft air blowing in her face, full of the delicious fragrance of golden wattle, Rachel ceased to cry--becoming calm, and pensive, and pretty again--and took to meditation; wondering, for the most part, what Queensland was like, and how it was she could ever have thought Melbourne, as a place of residence, preferable to the bush.

They pa.s.sed a charming little farmhouse, more picturesque in the simple elegance of its slab walls and brown bark roof than any Toorak villa of them all, set in its little patch of garden, with fields of young green corn and potatoes, neatly fenced in, behind it. It had its little rustic outbuildings, its bright red cart in the shed, its tidy strawyard, its cows and pigs and poultry feeding in the bush close by.

The farmer was working in his garden; the farmer's wife, on her knees beside him, was weeding and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the borders of thyme that ringed the little flower beds. They both paused to gaze at the imposing equipage crashing along with its four strong horses, and at the ladies and gentlemen perched so high above them; and Rachel, looking down from her box-seat, thought she had never seen such a picture of rural and domestic peace. She had suddenly ceased to regard material wealth and splendour as in any way essential to happiness.

To live in some such home as this (provided one had enough to live on and to pay one's way), working with one's own hands for the man one loved--that seemed to her at this moment the ideal lot in life.

Having started from Adelonga an hour before noon, the horses were taken out at two o'clock to be fed and watered, and the little party camped beside a shady water-hole for lunch.

Lucilla had put up a bounteous basket of good things, and all the materials for afternoon tea; and the fun of arranging the gra.s.sy table first, and of making a fire and boiling the kettle afterwards--not to speak of the very satisfactory meal that intervened--had its natural effect upon our impressionable heroine of eighteen.

Her _fiance_, much revived by a tumbler of dry champagne, carefully cooled in the water-hole, was also in improved spirits and temper, and he set himself to be very kind to his little sweetheart, and forgave her all her misdeeds.

Between three and four, having had their tea, the horses were put to, and they started on their way again; and just at nightfall they arrived at the railway, and at the inn where they were to spend the night.

Here they found dinner awaiting them, of which Rachel partook in sleepy silence; and she went to bed soon afterwards, and slept too soundly even to dream of trouble.

In the morning they parted from Mr. Thornley, and started by the first train to town; at noon they lunched in a railway refreshment-room; and in the middle of the afternoon they found themselves once more in Toorak, being helped out of the family brougham by good-natured Ned, and welcomed into the green satin drawing-room by his bright-faced wife.

"And so you are back again at last!" exclaimed Beatrice gaily, as she took her young cousin into her arms. "And how are you, dear child? Why you look quite pale. Take off your hat and sit down at once, and have some tea. Mr. Kingston, I don't think this country air that they talked so much about has done anything very wonderful after all. Rachel is not looking so well as she was when she left."

Rachel blushed a lovely rose-colour immediately, of course, and Mr.

Kingston looked up at her with vague anxiety.

"I don't think she is, myself," he said; "I noticed it as soon as I got up there. But she will be all right now she is home again."

"I am only tired," murmured Rachel.

"A girl like you has no business to be tired," retorted the little woman brusquely.

It did not escape her sharp eyes that something was the matter, and she determined to take the earliest opportunity to find out what it was.

"I do hope to goodness," she said to herself, "that it is not her engagement that she is tired of--and everything going on so nicely!"

And then she took off Rachel's sealskin cap and jacket, settled her by the fireside, furnished her with a cup of fragrant tea and some thin bread and b.u.t.ter, and left her to herself while she attended to her mother's wants.

Beatrice and her tea had a generally cheering and invigorating effect.

Mr. Kingston, making himself comfortable in a very easy chair, grew talkative and witty upon the news of the day and the latest items of fashionable gossip; in the society of this charming little woman of the world--_his_ world--the satisfaction of being in town again began to creep over him pleasantly.

He stayed for half an hour--outstaying Ned, who retired modestly at the end of twenty minutes; then he led Rachel into the hall, kissed her, told her to go to bed early and come out with him for a ride in the morning, and went off to his club--sorry to leave his little lady-love, but glad to be able to get his letters, to hear what was going on in Melbourne, and to read his "Argus" on the day of publication again.

After his departure Mrs. Hardy and Beatrice plunged fathoms deep in talk. Mrs. Hardy wanted to know how her husband and her servants, and her neighbours and her friends, had been conducting themselves during her absence, and Beatrice wanted minute particulars about Lucilla and the baby.

Rachel had no occasion to feel herself _de trop_; at the same time she saw she was not wanted. She sauntered softly round the room, laid some music scattered about over the piano in a neat pile, re-arranged some yellow pansies that were tumbling out of a green Vallauris bowl, and then stole noiselessly into the hall and out of the house.

The grounds of the Hardy domain were more beautiful with flowers now than she had ever seen them; but she did not stay amongst the flowers.

She went down little lonely paths, intersecting vegetable beds and forcing-frames, to a gate at the bottom of the kitchen-garden, where she was within speaking distance of the workmen engaged on the new house, with nothing to impede a full view of their operations.

She was feverishly anxious to know how they were going on--whether they were still "pottering at the foundations," or whether the stage of walls had set in.

The working day was not yet over, and the well-known c.h.i.n.king and clinking of the stonemason's implements smote her ear. She thought, when she began to count them, that there were a great many more men than there used to be, and she wondered why this was.

The young man who was sent out by the architects to supervise the builders, and whose acquaintance she had made with Mr. Kingston, was walking about the dusty enclosure, and presently recognising her, he lifted his hat, and then seeing that she still lingered, came up to the gate to speak to her.

"How are you getting on, Mr. Moore?" she asked pleasantly. "Are you still doing the foundations?"

Mr. Moore a.s.sured her that they had completed the foundations, and that they were getting on splendidly.

"Won't you come out and have a look at what has been done?" he inquired.

She thanked him and said she would; and he opened the gate with alacrity, and escorted her through a labyrinth of bricks and stones, over ground strewn thickly with sharp-edged chips that cut holes in her boots, very well pleased to be the first to show her the progress that had been made in her absence.

She could see for herself that a great deal had been done. The trenches were filled up; great square blocks of stone ridged the outlines of the ground-floor rooms--little bits of rooms they looked, and not at all like the stately and s.p.a.cious apartments of the architect's design; but it seemed to her that what had been done could not be a tenth or twentieth part of all that there was to do.

"I suppose," she said, "it takes a long time to build the walls and make such a quant.i.ty of windows?"