Mr. Frankston could not by any means comprehend this deflection of his daughter’s equable mental constitution. After much consideration he came to the conclusion that she wanted change of air—that the depressing hot season was telling upon her health for the first time in his recollection; and he cast about for an eligible chance to send her to some friends in Tasmania, where the keener air, the somewhat more bracing island climate, might restore her to the animation which he feared she was losing day by day.
He thought also, amid his loving plans and plottings for his daughter’s welfare, that possibly she needed the stimulus of additional society. They had been living quietly at Morahmee of late, and the season of comparative gaiety, which in Sydney generally dates from the birthnight of the Empress of Anglo-Saxondom, had not as yet arrived.
‘We want a little rousing up,’ thought poor Paul; ‘we have had no little dinners lately, no one in the evenings. I have been thinking over this confounded season and these bothering bills till I have forgotten my own darling, but for whose sake the whole country might be swallowed up in Mauna Loa, for all old Paul cares. I shouldn’t say that either; but it seems hard that anything should ail the poor darling that care might have prevented. If her mother had lived—ah!’ and here Paul fell a-thinking, until the wheels of the dogcart grated against the pavement near the office door.
Thus it so chanced that, towards the end of the week, occurred one of the little dinners for which Morahmee was famous, with a ‘whip’ of certain musical celebrities of the neighbourhood, and as many ordinary guests as made a successful compromise between all ‘music,’ which sometimes hath not ‘charms’ for the masculine breast, and a regulation evening party, which would have been an anachronism.
Among the guests for whom Paul, in his anxiety for a healthful distraction for Antonia, had swept the clubs and the hotels, were Mr. Hardy Baldacre and Jermyn Croker. Squatters were scarce in Sydney beyond previous experience. They were all at home on their stations attending to their stock, except those who were in town attending to their bills. These last were chiefly indisposed to society. They dined at their clubs or hotels after half a day’s waiting in the manager’s ante-chamber, and felt more inclined for the repose of the smoking-room than for the excitement of the society.