Part 14

So while Mr. Cameron was away with Challis on the Australian tour, she filled in all her spare time undertaking a mission to Miss Browne. Her first battle was to make the woman respect herself, trust herself. She ordered some clothes for her, well-cut coats and skirts, warm-coloured home dresses with soft lace to hide the bony neck and wrists. She gave deep thought to a style of doing her hair, and having found it, kept her to it, insisting that she should give plenty of time to curling those helpless strands and brushing them and getting them into good condition. She encouraged her to form her own opinions on things, and teased her gently out of her little eccentricities of speech. She applied herself energetically to making her capable and efficient in the branches of housekeeping which all these years she had so hopelessly muddled. The mission was sheer hard, exhausting work--there were times when it seemed almost desperate; but women have battled far harder and with far less hope of success with the Island blacks or the far Chinese, and here was her work come to her hand.

'Why,' cried the changed woman, at the end of a day that had seen the accomplishment of a most respectable pie-crust, an almost invisible patch on a coat, and a hard piece of music mastered, 'I shall be able to ask for ten shillings a week, I am sure, when I go to the registry office again; I never used to get more than five or six until I came to Mr. Cameron, and I am sure I was not worth the ten he used to pay me then.'

'My dear,' said Mrs. Cameron, 'you have finished with registry offices. I want you to come to England with us, and help me with Floss and Roly.'

This decision she and her husband had only just arrived at; to leave her behind, even improved as she was, would mean she would soon sink back without stimulus into her dreary ways. So Challis gave yet one more concert in a country town, to pay for the extra passage money and frocks, and the future they left to look after itself. She had a relative or two in England who might give her a home; if not, well, unless life went very crookedly again, they would always keep a corner for her themselves wherever they lived.

But before they had been in London six months the pleased Fates relieved them of their anxiety.

Next door to them in the pleasant home they had made was a widower, just getting over--and without overmuch difficulty--the loss of a wife who had insisted upon managing his very soul as well as his house, and his two children and his very respectable cheque-book.

His small ones were running wild--he noted the contrast between them and Floss and Roly, whom Miss Browne seemed now to manage so admirably. The intimacy increased; the change from his past, overruled existence to the companionship of this gentle lady-help, who deferred humbly to his opinions, and asked his advice, and was curiously grateful for the smallest attention, was such a restful novelty to him that he offered her his hand and heart and lonely little children forthwith.

And now that Fortune, so long harsh and uncompromising, had taken to flinging gifts at the family with unstinted hand, it did not leave Cameron himself out of its scheme of sudden generosity.

The picture of the ship had found its way safely from under Miss Browne's bed at Wilgandra across the sea to the artist who painted in leafy Fontainebleau pictures the world was pleased to stand and look at long.

And the man's artist-soul rose in recognition of the passion and strength that had gone forth into the brush that had worked so feverishly in that far-away bush township.

An important Paris exhibition was just coming on. He rushed up to the city with the canvas, and his influence got it in at the right time, and saw it well hung. The second day the exhibition was opened it sold for two hundred guineas, and the path Cameron had ached to walk on all his life was at last open to his feet.

The day had not dropped her burdens from the backs of these people for ever; it had merely strengthened weak shoulders with soldierly discipline, and readjusted the weight.

Bright days, sad days, separations, meetings, temptations, love, death, all would come along, as they always have done, as they always will.

For this is Life we fare upon, and not just a little journey to ask smooth ground for all the way.

THE END.

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