n."

CHAPTER VIII. AT THE HOMESTEAD.

Miss Grant's arrival at Kuryong homestead caused great excitement among
the inhabitants. Mrs. Gordon received her in a motherly way, trying hard
not to feel that a new mistress had come into the house; she was anxious
to see whether the girl exhibited any signs of her father's fiery temper
and imperious disposition. 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. The station-hands--Joe, the wood-and-water boy, old Alfred the
groom, Bill the horse-team driver, and Harry Warden the married man, who
helped with sheep, mended fences, and did station-work in general--all
watched for a sight of her. They exchanged opinions about her over their
smoke at night by the huge open fireplace in the men's hut, where
they sat in a semicircle, toasting their shins at the blaze till their
trousers smoked again, each man with a pipe of black tobacco going full
swing from tea till bedtime. But the person who felt the most intense
excitement over the arrival of the heiress was Miss Harriott.

For all her nurse's experience, Ellen Harriott was not a woman of the
world. Except for the period of her hospital training, she had passed
all her life shut up among the mountains. Her dream-world was mostly
constructed out of high-class novels, and she united a shrewd wit and a
clever brain to a dense ignorance of the real world, that left her like
a ship without a rudder. She was, like most bush-reared girls, a great
visionary--many a castle-in-the-air had she built while taking her daily
walk by the river under the drooping willows. The visions, curiously
enough, always took the direction of magnificence. She pictured herself
as a leader of society, covered with diamonds, standing at the head of
a broad marble staircase and receiving Counts by the dozen (vide Ouida's
novels, read by stealth); or else as a rich man's wife who dispensed
hospitality regally, and was presented at Court, and set the fashion
in dress and jewels. At the back of all her dreams there was always
a man--a girl's picture is never complete without a man--a strong,
masterful man, whose will should crush down opposition, and whose
abilities should make his name--and incidentally her name--famous all
over the world