and-white daisy the sun has
been too much for.

One by one the long hours dragged away; farther and farther through
the silent, sleeping country flew the red-eyed train, swerving round
zigzag curves, slackening up steeper places, flashing across the
endless stretching plains.

The blackness grew grey and paler grey, and miles and miles of
monotonous gum saplings lay between the train and sky. Up burst
the sun, and the world grew soft and rosy like a baby waked from
sleep. Then the grey gathered again, the pink, quivering lights
faded out, and the rain came down--torrents of it, beating against
the shaking window-glass, whirled wildly ahead by a rough morning
wind, flying down from the mountains. Such a crushed, dull-eyed,
subdued-looking eight they were as they tumbled out on the Curlewis
platform when five o'clock came. Judy coughed at the wet, early,
air, and was hurried into the waiting-room and wrapped in a rug.

Then the train tossed out their trunks and portmanteaux and rushed on
again, leaving them desolate and miserable, looking after it, for it
seemed no one had come to meet them.

The sound of wet wheels slushing through puddles, the crack of a whip,
the even falling of horses' feet, and they were all outside again,
looking beyond the white railway palings to the road.

There were a big, covered waggonette driven by a wide yellow oil-skin
with a man somewhere in its interior, and a high buggy, from which an
immensely tall man was climbing.

"Father!"

Esther rushed out into the rain. She put her arms round the dripping
mackintosh and clung fast to it for a minute or two. Perhaps that is
what made her cheeks and eyes so wet and shining.

"Little girl--little Esther child!" he said, and almost lifted her
off the ground as he kissed her, tall though Meg considered her.

Then he hurried them all off into the buggies, five in one and three
in the other. There was a twenty-five-mile drive before them yet.

"When did you have anything to eat last?" he asked; the depressed
looks of the children were making him quite unhappy. "Mother has
sent you biscuits and sandwiches, but we, can't get coffee or
anything hot till we get home."

Nine o'clock, Esther told him, at Newcastle, but it was so boiling
hot they had had to leave most of it in their cups and scramble into
the train again. The horses were whipped up; and flew over the
muddy roads at a pace that Pip, despite his weariness, could not but
a