?" demanded Peter of the long memory.
"Were you bewitched over to England?"

"Come, come," said Mr. Chase; "dinner first and stories afterwards.
We shall have to eat cinders as it is, I expect, and cook will give
notice to-morrow."

"Every one must come into the dining-room, father," laughed Aunt
Dorothy; "I can't part with one of you yet. We will talk while we
eat."

In a moment everything seemed changed. All the severity had faded
from the old people's faces; they could not have looked more
delightfully "grannyish" if they had tried. The dreadful barriers
of formality were broken down; no noisier, freer family party had
ever gathered in the Queensland home than the one that peopled the
stately old dining-room that night.

"This," whispered Brenda to Nesta, "is how we always were before
Aunt Dorothy went away. Now you can see why we missed her."

The change was something like a fairy tale to the Bush children;
every one seemed suddenly "magicked" into different beings. This,
then, was home as mother had known it.

The story of Aunt Dorothy's rescue held the table spellbound; the
very butler and footman forgot their duties as they listened.

It appeared that, having jumped into the water with Peter, Dorothy
struck out as fast as possible to swim away from the ship, keeping
a grip of the little fellow as best she could. But in the terrible
commotion that occurred on the going down of the _Cora_ she lost
her grasp, and Peter was swept away from her into the inky
blackness of the night.

She swam, floated, called, it seemed to her for ages, but all in
vain, and at last, in a state of utter exhaustion, she gave herself
up merely to the thought of keeping afloat. She must have been many
hours in the water, but, losing consciousness after a while, her
next experience was to find herself on board a vessel of some
sort--a schooner it turned out to be on her way out to the reefs
for beche-de-mer fishing.

"Why, we saw her!" exclaimed Eustace. "Mother, that must have been
the boat we saw far away out to sea. The captain of the station
told us it was theirs."

"They must have picked me up soon after dawn, before the turn of
the tide," said Aunt Dorothy. "I think when I came to my senses and
saw the kind of people I was among, I was more frightened than I
had been even by the wreck. Most of them were black-fellows--the
rest I have since discovered were Portuguese; but not a soul in all
that uncouth crowd could speak