There were a big, covered waggonette driven by a wide yellow oil-skin with a man somewhere in its interior, and a high buggy, from which an immensely tall man was climbing.

“Father!”

Esther rushed out into the rain.  She put her arms round the dripping mackintosh and clung fast to it for a minute or two.  Perhaps that is what made her cheeks and eyes so wet and shining.

“Little girl—­little Esther child!” he said, and almost lifted her off the ground as he kissed her, tall though Meg considered her.

Then he hurried them all off into the buggies, five in one and three in the other.  There was a twenty-five-mile drive before them yet.

“When did you have anything to eat last?” he asked; the depressed looks of the children were making him quite unhappy.  “Mother has sent you biscuits and sandwiches, but we, can’t get coffee or anything hot till we get home.”

Nine o’clock, Esther told him, at Newcastle, but it was so boiling hot they had had to leave most of it in their cups and scramble into the train again.  The horses were whipped up; and flew over the muddy roads at a pace that Pip, despite his weariness, could not but admire.

But it was a very damp, miserable drive, and the General wept with hardly a break from start to finish, greatly to Esther’s vexation, for it was his first introduction to his grandfather.

At last, when everyone was beginning to feel the very end of patience had come, a high white gate broke the monotony of dripping wet fences.

“Home!” Esther said joyfully.  She jumped the General up and down on her knee.

“Little Boy Blue, Mum fell off that gate when she was three,” said she, looking at it affectionately as Pip swung it open.

Splash through the rain again; the wheels went softly now, for the way was covered with wet fallen leaves.

“Oh, where is the house?” Bunty said, peeping through Pip’s arm on the box seat, and seeing still nothing but an endless vista of gum trees.  “I thought, you said we were there, Esther.”

“Oh, the front door is not quite so near the gate as at Misrule,” she said.  And indeed it was not.

It was fifteen minutes before they even saw the chimneys, then there was another gate to be opened.  A gravel drive now trimly kept, high box round the flower-beds, a wilderness of rose bushes that pleased Meg’s eye, two chip tennis-courts under water.

Then the house.

The veranda was all they noticed; such a wide one it was, as wide as an ordinary room, and there were lounges and chairs and tables scattered about, hammocks swung from the corners, and a green thick creeper with rain-blown wisteria for an outer wall.

“O—­o—­oh,” said Pip; “o—­oh!  I am stiff—­o—­oh, I say, what are you doing?”

For Esther had deposited her infant on his knee, and leapt out of the waggonette and up the veranda steps.