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Presently she saw him raking about among a sheaf of waratahs with which she had hidden the ugly old grate. He looked up exultantly. "Six cigarette ends! That's enough to make three if I roll them thin. Lord be thanked I've some cigarette papers." There was something so pathetic about this that she forgot to feel contemptuous about it.
The tennis-court was guarded along both ends by soldierly rows of magnificently grown waratahs, that from October to Christmas time were all in bloom and worth coming far to see. And you approached that same tennis-court through a shady plantation, where every tree and shrub was native-born, and the ground carpeted with gay patches of boronia and other purely aboriginal loveliness.
She must have realized this, for, when they neared the waratahs she stood absolutely still and waited. "You're in for it now, my fine chap," Hugh said to himself, "and she'll weep she's just the sort to weep. Well, you jolly well deserve it, you brute." Then he walked up to her. She wore a dark blue cambric to-day with a soft leather belt and dainty white muslin cuffs and collar as a relief.
No, they are the waratahs, which love to grow where there have been bush-fires. The waratah is of a brilliant red colour, growing single and stately on a high stalk. Its shape is of a heart; its size about that of a pear.
Hugh gave a peremptory whistle and the boy looked over his shoulder, then responded to the beckon by bringing his horse sharply round and cantering briskly across to the waratahs. "Something else, Miss Bibby, ma'am?" he said, whipping out his order book. "What do you mean by not delivering the note I gave you from the wagonette on Thursday?" said Hugh angrily.
So Pauline stood guard at the waratahs, and Lynn and Anna prevented any more dodging at the bamboos, and Miss Bibby cut off the retreat to the house and Muffie worried him in the rear. Surely, surely by tactics like these they drove him right into a corner. Had there been a fence he would have shown fight a little longer by scrambling up it and continuing the chase on the other side.
Some of them do so; others wander up the sides of the gully and collect wildflowers for the table, which will not be a table at all, but just a cloth spread over the grass. They come back with the news that they have seen waratahs growing.
The children sighed for the times when their mother had been with them, and had had such a delightful habit of having that meal served in all sorts of unexpected places, even on days when they could not go for an orthodox picnic. Behind the waratahs one day and of course they imagined themselves waited on by a row of stiff and magnificent footmen in red plush.
It flashed two glimpses of her before Hugh's eyes, one as she knelt on the path and dragged at a child's obstinate shoe biting her lips while the marauding ants ran up her own sleeves. And the other as she faced him, white-cheeked against the ruddy waratahs, and told him she "preferred to talk of the New Zealand Terraces."
"We gen'ally hide ahind the waratahs or the bamboos, or up a tree's a good place," said Muffie, much interested. If it were hide-and-seek about to begin, this is where Max shone. He laid down his pen and slipped down from his chair. "I'll find her for you," he said. "I find licker than any one. Once I found Paul an' she was lapped up in the sheets in the linen less."
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