Over the Blue Mountains by Mary Burchell Page A

Carol offered to take Juliet on an informal tour of the place. Max had already ridden off on some affairs of his own, and the two girls—with the children for company—were lingering over a second cup of coffee.
    “Thank you. I would love it,” Juliet said. “But first of all, can I have some real idea of where I am? I mean—names don’t convey much to me, of course, but—am I still in New South Wales, for one thing?”
    Carol laughed a good deal at this.
    “Dear me, yes! How big did you think New South Wales was? You would have to go quite a long way farther before you tumbled over the edge of it, believe me.”
    “It hasn’t got an edge,” announced Isobel, who had been following this conversation with great attention. “At least, not the sort you fall over. It’s flat. You can see it on my map.”
    “A map!” exclaimed Juliet. “That the thing. Will someone show me where I am, on the map?”
    “I will! I will!” cried Isobel, and rushed away in search of a map, closely followed by Peter, who panted in the rear, crying, “I’ll show her, too,” though he had only the vaguest idea of what he wanted to show to whom.
    Both children returned in a few minutes with a somewhat tattered map of Australia, which Isobel proceeded to spread out on the table in front of Juliet. Then, kneeling on a chair, she hung over it, breathing loudly, while Peter climbed onto Juliet’s knee, saying, “I want to see, too,” and then, belatedly, “please.”
    Juliet bent her head over the map.
    “Here is Sydney.” She put a finger on the familiar spot, while Isobel poised an anxious pencil over the map, ready to pounce on the place she sought, as soon as she spied it. “And here is Katoomba.” Juliet bit her lip at the momentary recollection of the high hopes she had entertained while she lunched there. But she went on resolutely. “I’m not sure which direction we took after that. Across the mountains in some way...”
    “Here we are!” shrieked Isobel triumphantly, and in her anxiety to point out the place she made a pencil mark that must have covered about eighty square miles. “Daddy says we’re just there, near that tri-tri-tributary of the river. That’s where our house is—just there, isn’t it, mommy?”
    Laughing, Carol leaned over Juliet’s shoulder familiarly, so that she was deliciously conscious of being very much a part of a family group.
    “Let me see. Ye-es. Near enough. Not more than a hundred miles out anyway. Here is Bathurst to the north, Juliet.” Taking Isobel’s pencil, she used it as a pointer, but without making the marks that her excited little daughter seemed unable to avoid. “And here we are—on the edge of the sheep country.”
    “And is yours a sheep farm?” Juliet inquired.
    “Station,” Carol amended, smiling. “Yes. Though we do a certain amount of mixed farming near the house itself. It’s rather unusual for the family to live on such a big station, but I was not prepared to live in town while Henry slaved away here.”
    “I should think not!”
    “Well, living here has it problems, of course, apart from the actual loneliness,” Carol said. “But fortunately, we have all been w onderfully well—” she lightly touched the table and smiled over her own small concession to superstition “—and we are within one circuit of the flying-doctor service. Isobel will be going to boarding school next year, but she is looking forward to that, aren’t you, pet?”
    Isobel looked up from her map and nodded absently. It was obvious that she had long been used to the idea of boarding school and that it held no terrors for her.
    “Anyway, whatever the disadvantages of such an isolated existence, I felt the main thing was for us to be all together,” Carol said. “And that’s why we built a house that was very much a home. I’ve never been to England, but I wanted something that was like an English country house.”
    “It’s a beautiful house,” Juliet assured her