comfortable, fat voice died away, and the apron was at her eyes again.
"What'll Billabong be, with its little girl at school?"

"At--WHERE?" asked Norah.

She had come in with the tea-tray in her hands--a little flushed from
the fire, and her brown face alight with all the hundred-and-one things
she had yet to tell Daddy. On the threshold she paused, struck
motionless by that amazing speech. She looked a little helplessly from
one face to the other; and the two who loved her felt the same
helplessness as they looked back. It was not an easy thing to pass
sentence of exile from Billabong on Norah.

"I--" said her father. "You see, dear--Dick having gone--you know, your
aunt--" He stopped, his tongue tied by the look in Norah's eyes.

Brownie slipped into the breach.

"You're so big now, dearie," she said, "so, big--and--and--" With this
lucid effort at enlightenment she put her apron fairly over her head
and turned away to the open window.

But Norah's eyes were on her father. Just for a moment the sick sense
of bewilderment and despair seemed to crush her altogether. She had
realized her sentence in a flash--that the home that meant all the world
to her, and from which Heaven only differed in that Mother was there,
was to be changed for a new, strange world that would be empty of all
that she knew and loved. Vaguely she had always known that the blow
hung over her--now that it had fallen, for a moment there was no room
for any other thought. Her look, wide with grief and appeal, met her