ow, Nor?"

"Asleep," said Norah promptly. "Oh, I don't know--I don't believe
Brownie's asleep."

"I know she's not," Wally said. He and the old nurse-housekeeper of
Billabong were sworn allies; though no one could ever quite come up to
Jim and Norah in Brownie's heart, Wally had been a close third from the
day, long years back, that he had first come to the station, a lonely,
dark-eyed little Queenslander. "She's made the girls scrub and polish
until there's nothing left for them to rub, and she's harried Hogg and
Lee Wing until there isn't a leaf looking crooked in all the garden,
and she and Murty have planned all about meeting you for the hundred and
first time."

"And she's planning to make pikelets for you!" put in Norah.

"Bless her. I wouldn't wonder. She's planning the very wildest cooking,
of course--do you remember what the table used to be the night we came
home from school? And now she's gone round all the rooms to make sure
she couldn't spend another sixpence on them, and she's sitting by her
window trying to see us all on the Nauru. 'Specially you, old Nor."

"'Tis the gift of second sight you have," said Jim admiringly. "A
few hundred years ago you'd have got yourself ducked as a witch or
something."

"Oh, Wally and Brownie were always twin souls; no wonder each knows what
the other is thinking of," Norah said, laughing. "It all sounds exactly
true, at any rate. Boys, what a pity you can't land in uniform--wouldn't
they all love to see you!"

"Can't do it," Jim said. "Too long since we were shot out of the army;
any enterprising provost-marshal could make himself obnoxious about it."

"I know--but I'm sorry," answered Norah. "Brownie won't be satisfied
unless she sees you in all your war paint."

"We'll put it on some night for dinner," Jim promised. He peered
suddenly into the darkness. "There's a moving light--it's the pilot
steamer coming out for us."

They watched the light pass slowly from the dim region that meant the
Heads, until, as the pilot boat swung out through the Rip to where the
Nauru lay, her other lights grew clear, and presently her whole outline
loomed indistinctly, suddenly close to them. She lay to across a little
heaving strip of sea, and presently the pilot was being pulled across
to them by a couple of men and was coming nimbly up the Nauru's ladder,
hand over hand. He nodded cheerily at his welcome--a fusillade of
greetings from every "digger" who could find a place at