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First Impressions

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The driver of the service car having deposited Ann, her hatbox, her two suitcases, and her cabin trunk, in front of the Omoana Hotel, swung round and made for the little iron-roofed post office, where he proceeded to throw out the canvas mail bags.

But Ann was no longer interested in the service car. She stood on the veranda of the two-storied wooden building, feeling very hot in the afternoon sunshine and wondering rather forlornly why no one had appeared to welcome her. “Welcome” wasn’t perhaps the right word. She had sufficient commonsense to realize that the arrival of a nursery governess wasn’t an event of any great importance; but she had understood from Mrs. Holmes’s letter that some one would meet her at the Omoana Hotel, and take her on the further seven miles to the station homestead.

Evidently Omoana township ended with the hotel. Certainly the dusty roadway ran on a little further into the tussocky grass of the sandhills, but after a few yards it seemed to lose heart and give up all hope of reaching the beach beyond, where an endless line of breakers rolling in from the blue Pacific fringed the bay with white. The sound of the surf was at least cool and refreshing, but Ann had been hearing that

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