The poor little girl, who had gone up so resolved to be calm and brave, screamed out uncontrollably at the cruel news, then buried her head in her hands to keep the moans back.
The old man brought her a glass of water from the sideboard.
’Let’s tear it up,’ he said, and rent the horrid news in pieces. ’Let’s only remember the boy did the right thing, and died like a man.’
He found himself comforting the girl who had come to comfort him. She found herself telling him with streaming eyes how she had loved his boy and thought of him, even though at the time he asked her she had said, ’No.’
’If only he could have known!’ she sobbed. ’Perhaps, perhaps he was thinking of me part of that night when he—was cold.’
The next day there was another cable about the affair.
’The trooper who saved General Strong’s life at Krug’s Spruit was Private Mark Stevenson, of the Queensland Contingent, not Mortimer Stevenson of the New South Wales, as reported yesterday.’
Hermie tore along the road to Coolooli to rejoice with the old man, since before she had gone to grieve with him.
He was sitting on the verandah looking very shaken and bewildered, and reading the third cable as often as he had read the first.
Hermie had seized his two hands, and was shaking them joyously.
’Didn’t he do that fine thing at all?’ he said.
’No,’ she cried. ’Some other man did it, thank God! He is alive, alive—Mortimer—he is not dead!
He drew his hands out of her eager ones a little pettishly.
’They should be more careful with these cables,’ he said.
’Oh,’ she cried happily, ’we will forgive them anything! He is alive—alive!’
’But he never did that fine thing,’ he repeated sadly.
’Let one more attest I have lived, seen God’s hand through a lifetime, and all was for best.’
Life, so long a hopeless tangle, smoothed itself out at last for the little family. Challis was well again, and had gone off to give a series of concerts in the respective capitals of each colony; gone off in high spirits, touched with sweet responsibility, inasmuch as she was the bread-winner for the family. Mr. Cameron went with her this time, and her mother stayed thankfully at home on the selection. And Australia, despite the fact that she neither recited ’The Absent-Minded Beggar,’ nor yet had ’Sons of the Empire’ in her _repertoire_, gave her so warm a welcome everywhere that in three months she was back again at The Rosery with a fresh thousand pounds put to her credit in the bank.