The Warners left in a huge motor, heaped confusedly with luggage and passengers, the twinses occupying precarious positions whenever they could escape from their mother's anxious eye.
"Be sure you bring some rough clothes!" was Mrs. Warner's farewell, as she clutched at a twin who threatened to dive over the wheel. "Thick boots, mind!"
"Mind you come, old Dick!" This from Bobby.
Only Merle said nothing. She sat beside her father, looking stiffly ahead, as the car slowly slid away from the little group on the hotel steps.
"I don't see why they want to come," she had said to her father.
"I suppose you'll get sense some day," was all Mr. Warner's rejoinder. He did not know that the curt remark hit her more sharply than a whole volume of remonstrance.
Merle was the one fly in the ointment in Dick's cheerful anticipations of his visit to the Warners' station. On the _Moondarra_ and in the hotel it had been easy enough to avoid being much with her, since she so clearly showed that she did not desire his company; but in her own home it would be different. They were too near in age, and too similar in tastes, not to be thrown together. That in itself was painful enough, since girls, to Dick, were rather boring creatures, full of queer whims and notions--not plain, straightforward people like Teddy Raine and Bottles and Nugent. But a girl who would not even take the trouble to be civil--that, in Dick's language, was "over the odds." He hoped that her governess would make regular demands upon her time, and grinned to think what would have been Merle's opinion of him, had she guessed at that particular hope.
However, life was too joyful at the moment to allow him to worry over Merle's whims. He began each day with a walk before breakfast with his father; long, brisk walks outside Perth, and long talks that bridged the year of silence that lay behind them. They swung along together, Dick rejoicing that he could now keep in step with his father--a year ago he had to jog if Mr. Lester lengthened his stride; and the father noting the development of his boy's mind as well as of his body, and meeting his questions and his crudely expressed views with a ready sympathy that knitted them more closely together than anything else could have done.