The sweetest, the most adorable little girl he had ever seen; hair of a color which defied description, not red and not gold, a perfect fusion of both. And looking up at him with silver-grey eyes of such a lambent purity, like melted jewels. Shrugging, he threw the cigarette stub into the fire and got to his feet. He was getting fanciful in his old age; melted jewels, indeed! More likely his own eyes were coming down with the sandy blight.

 

  In the morning he drove his overnight guests to Drogheda, so inured by now to the landscape that he derived great amusement from their comments. The last hill lay two hundred miles to the east; this was the land of the black soil plains, he explained. Just sweeping, lightly timbered grasslands as flat as a board. The day was as hot as the previous one, but the Daimler was a great deal more comfortable to travel in than the train had been. And they had started out early, fasting, Father Ralph's vestments and the Blessed Sacrament packed carefully in a black case.

 

  "The sheep are dirty!" said Meggie dolefully, gazing at the many hundreds of rusty-red bundles with their questing noses down into the grass. "Ah, I can see I ought to have chosen New Zealand," the priest said. "It must be like Ireland, then, and have nice cream sheep."

 "Yes, it is like Ireland in many ways; it has the same beautiful green grass. But it's wilder, a lot less tamed," Paddy answered. He liked Father Ralph very much.

 

  Just then a group of emus lurched to their feet and commenced to run, fleet as the wind, their ungainly legs a blur, their long necks stretched out. The children gasped and burst out laughing, enchanted at seeing giant birds which ran instead of flying.

 

  "What a pleasure it is not to have to get out and open these' wretched gates," Father Ralph said as the last one was shut behind them and Bob, who had done gate duty for him, scrambled back into the car. After the shocks Australia had administered to them in bewildering rapidity, Drogheda homestead seemed like a touch of home, with its gracious Georgian facade and its budding wistaria vines, its thousands of rosebushes. "Are we going to live here?" Meggie squeaked. "Not exactly," the priest said quickly. "The house you're going to live in is about a mile further on, down by the creek."

 

  Mary Carson was waiting to receive them in the vast drawing room and did not rise to greet her brother, but forced him to come to her as she sat in her wing chair.