"Only it's hard to take in. I keep
fancying that I'll certainly wake up in a minute and find myself in
a trench, just getting ready to go over the top. What do you suppose
they're doing at Billabong now, 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.
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