me up. I'll be at the gate."

Baby was used, as were all of the others except Dot, to an open-air
existence. Most of her daylight hours were spent, either rolling on the
rough lawn, or sleeping in a hammock swung beneath an apple tree, and as
a result, night-tide found her a very drowsy baby indeed. The children
might romp and sing and chatter around her very cot as she slept, but
she could not steal out of her slumbers even to blink a golden eyelash
at them.

So that when Cyril overtook Elizabeth at the gate, my Lady Baby was
asleep in his arms, and so she stayed in spite of the thumping of his
heart, and the chatter of the ghost, and the rough road.

The night was dark with the luminous darkness of an Australian summer
night. The tender sky was scattered with star-dust, a baby-moon peeped
over the hill-top and the leaves and branches of the great bush trees
lay like dark fretwork over the heavens.

Betty, holding her dress well up, and Cyril carrying the sleeping baby,
hurried through the belt of bush that lay between their home and their
grandfather's. Betty strove to instil energy into her listless brother,
telling him stories of a golden future in store for him. But at the
two-rail fence below "Coral Island Brook," Cyril came to a standstill,
and urged Betty, who was under it in a trice and on her feet again, to
"come along home."

Betty turned her ghastly face towards him indignantly. "I won't," she
said fiercely. "Give me the baby and go home yourself if you like."

Between the outer world of bush and the house was a slip of ground
called the banana grove, and known in story to both boy and girl, as the
play-place of their mother.

Cyril followed Betty through this grove, trying to make up his mind as
he went, whether to go or stay. To stay and take his part in the
proceedings; to do and be bold--as an inner voice kept urging him--to
blend his moans with Betty's, and carry the heavy baby; or to turn upon
his heels, and fly through the darkness from these horrid haunted
grounds where his grandsire, and the great emus and dogs lived; where
John Brown stated he had his dwelling--away from all these terrors to
his small cottage home on the other edge of the bush, where were parents
and sisters, music and lights--and another voice urged this.

So he neither followed Betty nor went home; but, in dreadful doubt and
great fear, he hung between the two courses in the banana grove, and
shivered at the tree-trunks