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From which it would seem that one, at any rate, of the Kuryong household was not wholly indifferent to Mr. Blake. After breakfast next morning Mary decided to spend the day in the company of the children, who were having holidays. "Just as well for you to learn the house firsts" said Hugh, "before you tackle the property. The youngsters know where everything is within four miles, anyhow."
The tipstaff waited cheerfully enough, until he heard the crack of a revolver-shot echo through the passages of the big boarding-house. Then he rushed upstairs to find that Gavan Blake had gone before another Court than the one that was waiting for him so anxiously. After the great case was over life at Kuryong went on its old round.
Next morning the Doctor arrived with a trail of Red Mick's relations after him; among them they arranged to take him into Tarrong to be operated on, and Ellen Harriott and Carew drove back to Kuryong feeling as if they had known each other all their lives.
She had a petite, but well-rounded figure, with curiously small hands and feet. Though only about twenty-four years of age she had the sedate and unemotional look that one sees in doctors and nurses -people who have looked on death and birth, and sorrow and affliction. She knew them all, for she had lived nearly all her life at Kuryong.
The two servant-girls at the homestead great herculean, good-natured bush-girls, daughters of a boundary-rider, whose highest ideal of style and refinement was Kuryong drawing-room breathed hard and stared round-eyed, like wild fillies, at the unconscious intruder.
Reading this letter called back the whole panorama of the past the old days when she and her husband were struggling in the rough, hard, pioneering life, and the blacks were thick round the station; the birth of her children, and the ups and downs of her husband's fortunes; then the burial of her husband out on the sandhills, and her flight to this haven of rest at Kuryong.
She herself, of course, was always the foremost figure, the handsomest woman, the best-dressed, the most admired; for Ellen Harriott, though only a girl, and a friendless governess at Kuryong, was not inclined to put herself second to anyone. Having learnt from her father's papers that he was of an old family, she considered herself anybody's equal.
Thus it was that, on the holiday at Kuryong, the Bachelors' Quarters two large dormitory-like rooms that opened into one another were full of athletic male figures sprawling on the beds, smoking black pipes all day, and yarning interminably. The main topic of conversation was Peggy's claim against the estate.
In fact he did not get on half so far as did Gavan Blake, who came up to Kuryong occasionally, and made himself so agreeable that already his name was being coupled with that of the heiress. Ellen Harriott always spoke to Blake when he came to the station, and gave no sign of jealousy at his attentions to Mary Grant; but she was waiting and watching, as one who has been a nurse learns to do.
He walked up and down between the smoking-room chairs, brandishing a telegram as he talked, while the attorney and the globe-trotter lay back on the lounge and admired his energy. "I call it a shame," he said, facing round on them suddenly; "I could have got up to Moss Vale for a day or two, and now old Grant of Kuryong wires me to meet and entertain a new chum.
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