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. She herself, of course, was always the foremost
figure, the handsomest woman, the best-dressed, the most admired;
for Ellen Harriott, though only a girl, and a friendless governess
at Kuryong, was not inclined to put herself second to anyone. Having
learnt from her father's papers that he was of an old family, she
considered herself anybody's equal. Her brain held a crazy enough
jumble of ideas, no doubt; but given a strong imagination, no
experience, and omnivorous reading, a young girl's mind is exactly
the place where fantastic ideas will breed and multiply. She went
about with Mrs. Gordon to the small festivities of the district,
and was welcomed everywhere, and deferred to by the local settlers;
she had yet to know what a snub meant; so the world to her seemed a
very easy sort of place to get along in. The coming of the heiress
was as light over a trackless ocean. Here was someone who had seen,
known, and done all the things which she herself wished to see, know,
and do; someone who had travelled on the Continent, tobogganed in
Switzerland, ridden in Rotten Row, voyaged in private yachts, hunted
in the shires; here was the world at last come to her door--the
world of which she had read so much and knew so little.