But after a time, when Esther made him a little bed on one of the seats and tried to lay him down upon it, a sense of his grievances came over him.

He had a swinging cot at home; with little gold bars at the foot to blink at—­he could not see why he should be mulcted of it, and made to put up with a rug three times doubled.  He was accustomed, too, to a shaded light, a quiet room, and a warning H’sh! h’sh! whenever people forgot themselves sufficiently to make the slightest noise.

Here the great yellow light flared all the time, and every one of the noisy creatures at whose hands he endured so much was within a few feet of him.

So he lifted up his voice and wept.  And when he found weeping did not produce his gold-barred cot, and the little dangling tassels on the mosquito nets, he raised his voice two notes, and when even there Esther only went on patting his shoulder in a soothing way he burst into roars absolutely deafening.

Nellie dangled all her long curls in his face to engage his attention, but he clutched them viciously and pulled till the tears came into her eyes.  Esther and Meg sang lullabies till their tongues ached, Judy tried walking him up and down the narrow space, but he stiffened himself in her arms, and she was not strong enough to hold him.  Finally he dropped off into an exhausted sleep, drawing deep, sobbing breaths and little hiccoughs of sorrow.

Then Bunty was discovered asleep on the floor with his head under a seat, and had to be lifted into an easier position; and Baby, bolt upright in a corner, was nodding like a little pink-and-white daisy the sun has been too much for.

One by one the long hours dragged away; farther and farther through the silent, sleeping country flew the red-eyed train, swerving round zigzag curves, slackening up steeper places, flashing across the endless stretching plains.

The blackness grew grey and paler grey, and miles and miles of monotonous gum saplings lay between the train and sky.  Up burst the sun, and the world grew soft and rosy like a baby waked from sleep.  Then the grey gathered again, the pink, quivering lights faded out, and the rain came down—­torrents of it, beating against the shaking window-glass, whirled wildly ahead by a rough morning wind, flying down from the mountains.  Such a crushed, dull-eyed, subdued-looking eight they were as they tumbled out on the Curlewis platform when five o’clock came.  Judy coughed at the wet, early, air, and was hurried into the waiting-room and wrapped in a rug.

Then the train tossed out their, trunks and portmanteaux and rushed on again, leaving them desolate and miserable, looking after it, for it seemed no one had come to meet them.

The sound of wet wheels slushing through puddles, the crack of a whip, the even falling of horses’ feet, and they were all outside again, looking beyond the white railway palings to the road.