to his work in his shirt-sleeves;
of her aunt helping in the housework; her cousins brought up just
anyhow, without a governess or any schooling, shocked her
sensibilities and gave vivid local colouring to her ideas about the
Orbans. Those were the sort of details she would never have
referred to at school.

And now she and Herbert were waiting for the arrival of the
travellers, whom their grandparents had driven to the station to
meet.

"Oh dear," she said with a sigh, "how I wish I didn't wish they
weren't coming! If they are fearfully eccentric, all the
neighbourhood will be talking about it in a week, and thinking it
funny we have such relations. One can't explain to every one that
they really are ladies and gentlemen gone to seed, can one?"

"Not exactly," said Herbert. "I jolly well hope you won't try; it
would be beastly bad form. Of course if one had a fellow staying in
the house one might have to explain."

"I simply couldn't ask any one," Brenda said. "It would be all over
the school next term my uncle was a common labourer, and my cousins
savages--or something!"

"Nice sort of friends you seem to have," said Herbert. "Is that a
girl's usual way?"

"Well," said Brenda, with some asperity, "boys aren't any better,
if you should have to explain matters to a chum of yours."

"That's different," Herbert said; "one doesn't want to give a bad
impression. What I hope is that Eustace isn't an awful little muff.
I expect he is, though--can't help being when he has never been
amongst any boys. It will have to be knocked out of him."

"Aunt Dorothy said he was a very nice little chap," Brenda quoted,
and then her voice broke, so that she could not go on.

It was the beginning of the summer holidays, and both she and
Herbert were feeling the death of Miss Chase most dreadfully. It
had been bad enough when she left before the end of the winter
holidays. Again at Easter the dullness of the house without her had
known no bounds. But now, when they knew she would never be with
them again, her very name choked them; they could scarcely speak of
her, because her absence proved at every turn all that her presence
had meant to them and to every one. How they had hated Australia
when she left! How much more they hated it now and everything to do
with it--even the coming of the cousins! Australia seemed the root
of all evil--the cause of Aunt Dorothy's death.

"Aunt Dorothy was a brick," said Herbert jerkily; "she saw