Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/64

years, how terrible it would have seemed in those dear old Australian days! We did not know then that the Fates were spinning a silk thread which was to lead you far away from our great sun-bleached solitary summer plains to the grey crags and heather-lined valleys of your Highland castle; and, as far as I am concerned, though I don't quite accuse the three weird sisters of keeping

still I must say that they have strangely equivocated, to say the least of it. Don’t you remember that in our day-dreams I was always to be a great singer? You, I think, wanted to marry a missionary—not that even then you looked quite suited to the part in your fashionable black silk with a long train, and with a gold locket as large as a warming-pan tied round your neck with two long ends of blue ribbon. In those days a really good black silk, with two bodices, was the height of woman’s ambition. But we change with the times. Other manners, other tea-gowns. You used to sing ‘What are the wild waves saying?’ and ‘When the swallows homeward fly,’ which always made me cry; and you were beautiful and high-toned, and I admired you with a girl’s first burning enthu-