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had occurred to her that if she “went back” with her usual abruptness, before she delivered her message, Mr. John Smith might be left in an awkward predicament.

He handed over the compass with careful directions. She nodded her head, waved her hand at her distractingly perplexing new acquaintance, and set off. Soon her entire attention was absorbed in finding her way, for, although she had used a compass often enough when Guiding, an Australian forest was something quite new, and to her it seemed as trackless as the ocean, every part of it looked so precisely the same as every other part. Eventually, however, she found herself safely back on the cart-track, though nowhere within sight of the Fairy Dell. She decided to go straight home to the Campbell’s house and ask there for help for Mr. John Smith. Mr. von Greusen would probably be out at this hour, and she felt shy of the big bearded men working about the place.

Mamma was in, and heard her story with concern.

“Of course he must come here,” she exclaimed, with true Australian hospitality, unquestioning and ungrudging. “He must be properly nursed and fed.” Mollie thought that Mamma looked rather pleased than otherwise at the prospect of nursing and feeding a good-looking young man newly out from home. Bridget was called, and between them all a room was got ready and made to look as homelike as possible. “Flowers and books,” said Mrs. Campbell, “always make a room look pleasant. I wish I had some photographs. I wonder who his people are. We’ll put up a picture of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and this little water-colour of a Sussex village; they are not quite the same thing as his mother or sweetheart, but they will be better than nothing.” She sighed as she looked at the water-colour. They were great people for sighing, Mollie thought. It must be rather miserable to be homesick so very, very far away from home!

When Prudence and Grizzel, accompanied by the boys, all not a little anxious about Mollie, arrived at home for dinner they found not only the missing Mollie but also Mr. John Smith on the balcony. Mollie ran down the steps to meet them, and gave a highly coloured account of her adventures. Past differences were forgiven and forgotten, and after dinner they all assembled on the balcony again with the benevolent intention of devoting themselves to the entertainment of the interesting invalid.

But Mrs. Campbell did not approve of this plan. “We are too many,” she said in her decided way. “Prudence and Mollie may stay; the rest of you must run away for the present. Grizzel can go for a walk with Bridget and Baby; I want a few things from the Store, and they can be brought up in the perambulator. The boys had better go up to Mr. von Greusen’s and see about getting Mr. Smith’s belongings brought here.”

“You might call at the Fairy Dell and get the Gordello,” Prudence suggested—for after all she and Grizzel had made the new drink in a fit of remorse—“Mr. Smith will perhaps like to taste it.”

The family melted away, and Mamma with the two girls settled down to needlework. Mamma’s kindly interest invited confidence under these pleasant circumstances, and it was not long before the young man was pouring his story into her sympathetic ears. Prudence listened spellbound. It was not often that one had romance brought to one’s very door—by a hero with a sprained ankle too! Such a romantic affliction! But Mollie was too much preoccupied by that haunting likeness to listen properly to what the hero was saying, once she had ascertained the fact that Mr. Smith belonged to the Campbell’s Time, and that therefore she could not possibly have met himself before; it must have been somebody extraordinarily like him. And yet—the number of her friends was not so very great that one could be totally forgotten. She tried not to think about it, but it stuck in the back of her brain in an irritating sort of way and refused to be forgotten.

His story was not at all an uncommon one: a love-affair, a selection of angry parents, lack of money, eternal vows, and a young man in search of a fortune. He had been told that fortunes lay about loose in Australia.

“Not that I mind working,” he said. “I like work all right, but it’s so slow, and we are getting older all the time. I rather fancied a vineyard; our parents are great on their cellars and might come round to a vineyard and wine. I spent some time in France before coming here, but it was hopeless. They won’t look at a foreigner in their wine concerns. As a matter of fact I have some hopes of my own governor relenting. I am his only son, and he is getting tired of keeping me at arm’s length. There’s nothing really in the way; only he had another wife in view for me, and Margaret’s father had another husband. He is rather a cantankerous old party. Too much port wine is what is the matter with them both, that’s my opinion; they’re turning gouty.”

As Mr. John Smith talked he pulled his watch out of his pocket and sprung it open. In the back lay a tiny photograph.

“That’s Margaret,” he said.

The others bent over the faintly tinted portrait of a young girl, pretty and smiling, her wavy hair rippling on either side of a smooth brow. Mollie glanced at it absent-mindedly; the back of her brain, she felt, was moving to the front; in another moment it would be there.

Mr. Smith looked affectionately at the pretty face. “That is my little girl,” he repeated, “and I—I ought to tell you—you are so kind—my name is not really John Smith. I dropped my real name because I wanted to dodge my governor—teach him a lesson, you know, not to play fast and loose with his only son—poor old governor! I have written to him since I came to Silver Fields. My real name is—

Suddenly Mollie began to laugh. It had come in a flash—the long chair, the bandaged foot on a foot-rest, the watch with its back open, the tattooed anchor and rope on a lean wrist, and above all a pair of dark eyes (so like Dick’s) crinkled up in a kindly smile: “You don’t blow hard enough, little Polly,” someone was saying, “try again.” The hair above the dark eyes was white, but Mollie knew.

“It’s so funny,” she cried, as they all looked at her, Prudence anxiously inquiring if she had “got it again”. “I’m all right, Prue, but it’s so funny. I know who you are,” she laughed again, turning to Mr. Smith. “Your name isn’t John Smith at all. You are poor dear Richard. Who was so active. With the gout. And you are—you are my—”

“Hush, Mollie!” said Prue.

 

*

 

Mollie sat up. She was still laughing. Aunt Mary stood beside her in hat and coat, her hands full of cardboard boxes from Buszard’s. Grannie sat at the tea-table, and opposite her was old Mrs. Pell, who had put on her bonnet because it would soon be time for her to go. They all looked at Mollie, who continued to laugh.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “It is only a fit of giggles. I have them sometimes.”

“Give the dear child her tea, Mary,” said Grannie. “Her nerves are a little highly strung; her grandfather used to laugh just like that— poor dear Richard!”

CHAPTER VII

The Aeronauts or The Fateful Stone

 

“Aunt Mary, how old is Time?” asked Mollie.

She was resting on her sofa in the garden, after her first attempt at a short walk. She had been wondering how her young grandpapa had got on with his sprained ankle, and longed to ask questions about him, but dared not venture even on the simplest. It was so easy to forget and ask too much. The day was rather hot, and the couch had been drawn into the shade of a great copper-beech. Mollie lay on her back, gazing up through the silky red foliage at the blue sky. Somewhere a thrush was singing, practising his flute-like phrases with conscientious care.

“I think he must be trying for a scholarship,” said Mollie. “How old is Time?” she repeated, bringing her gaze down from the tree-tops to Aunt Mary’s hands, busy as usual with needlework.

“How old is Time?” Aunt Mary echoed. “What do you mean exactly by Time?”

“I mean, how long is it since days began—morning and afternoon and evening?”

“Untold millions of years,” her aunt answered. “I don’t suppose that anyone could say exactly how many, and in any case when we speak of Time we mean Time on our own earth; what an astronomer would say I don’t know.”

“How do you know that it is millions of years old?” Mollie asked. “In the Bible it says that the evening and the morning were the first day in the year 4004 B.C. That is only five thousand, nine hundred and twenty-four years ago.”

“You are asking terribly big questions,” Aunt Mary said, with a smile. “It would take a long time to explain how men learnt to know the age of the world, and I am afraid I am hardly equal to the task. It is only about seventy years since geologists began to suspect that our earth was far older than they had supposed, I have some simple books which I think you could understand if you tried; and if you learn to take an interest in geology you need never be dull again as long as you live. You will find ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything’.”

“That would be very nice,” Mollie said politely but not enthusiastically; “but just now I only want to know how old Time is. Millions and millions of years,” she repeated to herself rather dreamily. “If you took forty from millions and millions it wouldn’t make any difference worth mentioning. It makes even Adam seem almost as near as last week. And this morning I said I hadn’t time to darn a hole in my stocking. I wonder if Eve said she had no time. Were there any people before Adam, Aunt Mary?”

Aunt Mary shook her head. “Ask the wise thrush,” she said; “his ancestors are older than mine.”

“Are they really!” Mollie exclaimed. “Did that thrush’s ever-so- great-grandfather sing in the Garden of Eden?”

Aunt Mary only answered with a smile, and Mollie listened again to the thrush, her thoughts wandering back to the times of forty years ago. Quite a little time, she mused. No wonder they were so little different, considering all things, from our own. She had thought that the children of those days must be frightfully dull, and terribly strictly kept; but on the whole they were, in some ways, less dull—or more exciting—and certainly had more liberty, than the children of to-day. Perhaps, however, that was Australia, where there was so much more room than there was in England. She wondered how Dick and Jerry were getting on to-day, and wished for the hundredth time that she could see them and talk things over. They had each other to talk to, but she had no one.

“Have you any diamonds, Aunt Mary?” she asked presently. “I should like to see some diamonds; and rubies and emeralds and topazes and opals and pearls and amethysts and sapphires, and all the precious stones you’ve got.”

“Bless my soul, Mollie! Do you think I am the Queen of Sheba!” Aunt Mary exclaimed. “Grannie has some old-fashioned jewellery locked away in a drawer, but the family diamonds are nothing to go

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