THAT is a long, long day to Ruby. From Glengarry they can watch far away the flames, like so many forked and lurid tongues of fire, leaping up into the still air and looking strangely out of place against the hazy blue of the summer sky. The little girl leaves her almost untouched dinner, and steals out to the verandah, where she sits, a forlorn-looking little figure, in the glare of the afternoon sunshine, with her knees drawn up to her chin, and her brown eyes following eagerly the pathway by the river where she has ridden with Dick no later than this morning. This morning!—to waiting Ruby it seems more like a century ago.

Jenny finds her there when she has washed up the dinner dishes, tidied all for the afternoon, and come out to get what she expresses as a “breath o’ caller air,” after her exertions of the day. The “breath o’ air” Jenny may get; but it will never be “caller” nor anything approaching “caller” at this season of the year. Poor Jenny, she may well sigh for the fresh moorland breezes of bonnie Scotland with its shady glens, where the bracken and wild hyacinth grow, and where the very plash of the mountain torrent or “sough” of the wind among the trees, makes one feel cool, however hot and sultry it may be.

“Ye’re no cryin’, Miss Ruby?” ejaculates Jenny. “No but that the heat o’ this outlandish place would gar anybody cry. What’s wrong wi’ ye, ma lambie?” Jenny can be very gentle upon occasion. “Are ye no weel?” For all her six years of residence in the bush, Jenny’s Scotch tongue is still aggressively Scotch.

Ruby raises a face in which tears and smiles struggle hard for mastery.

“I’m not crying, really, Jenny,” she answers. “Only,” with a suspicious droop of the dark-fringed eye-lids and at the corners of the rosy mouth, “I was pretty near it. It’s dad. I do wish he was home. I can’t help watching the flames, and thinking that something might perhaps be happening to him, and me not there to know. And then I began to feel glad to think how nice it would be to see him and Dick come riding home. Oh! Jenny, how do little girls get along who have no father?”

It is strange that Ruby never reflects that her own mother has gone from her. All her love is centred in dad.

“The Lord A’mighty tak’s care o’ such,” Jenny responds solemnly. “Ye’ll just weary your eyes glowerin’ awa’ at the fire like that, Miss Ruby. They say that ‘a watched pot never boils,’ an’ I’m thinkin’ your papa’ll no come a meenit suner for a’ your watchin’. Gae in an’ rest yersel’ like the mistress. She’s sleepin’ finely on the sofa.”

Ruby gives a little impatient wriggle. “How can I, Jenny,” she exclaims piteously, “when dad’s out there? Oh! I don’t know whatever I would do if anything was to happen to dad.”

“Pit yer trust in the Lord, ma dearie,” the Scotchwoman says reverently. “Ye’ll be in richt gude keepin’ then, an’ them ye love as weel.”

But Ruby only wriggles again. She does not want Jenny’s solemn talk. It is dad she desires. Dad, whom she loves so dearly, and whose little daughter’s heart would surely break if aught of ill befell him.

So the long, long afternoon wears away, and when is an afternoon so tedious as when one is eagerly waiting for something or some one? Jenny goes indoors again, and Ruby can hear the clatter of plates and cups echoing across the quadrangle as she makes ready the early tea. The child’s eyes are dim with the glare at which she has so long been gazing, and her limbs, in their cramped position, are aching; but Ruby hardly seems to feel the discomfort from which those useful members suffer. She goes in to tea with a grudge, listens to her stepmother’s fretful little complaints with an absent air which shows how far away her heart is, and returns as soon as she may to her point of vantage. “Oh, me!” sighs the poor little girl. “Will he never come?”

Out in the west the red sun is dying grandly in an amber sky, tinged with the glory of his life-blood, when dad at length comes riding home. Ruby has seen him far in the distance, and runs out past the gate to meet him.

“Oh, dad darling!” she cries. “I did think you were never coming. Oh, dad, are you hurt?” her quick eyes catching sight of his hand in a sling.

Her father laughs. “Only a scratch, little girl,” he says. “Don’t frighten the mother about it. Poor little Ruby red, were you frightened? Did you think your old father was to be killed outright?”

“I didn’t know,” Ruby says. Her eyes are shining now. “And mamma was frightened too. And when even Dick didn’t come back. Oh, dad, wasn’t it just dreadful—the fire, I mean?”

Black Prince has been put into the paddock, and Ruby goes into the house, hanging on her father’s uninjured arm. The child’s heart has grown suddenly light. The terrible fear which has been weighing her down for the last few hours has been lifted, and Ruby is her old joyous self again.

“Dad,” the little girl says later on. They are sitting out on the verandah, enjoying the comparative cool of the evening. “What will he do, old Davis, I mean, now that his house is burnt down? It won’t hardly be worth while his building another, now that he’s so old.”

Dad does not answer just for a moment, and Ruby, glancing quickly upwards, almost fancies that her father must be angry with her; his face is so very grave. Perhaps he does not even wish her to mention the name of the old man, who, but that he is “so old,” should now have been in prison.

“Old Davis will never need another house now, Ruby,” Dad answers, looking down into the eager little upturned face. “He has gone away. God has taken him away, dear.”

“He’s dead?” Ruby questions with wide-open, horror-stricken eyes.The little girl hardly hears her father as he goes on to tell her how the old man’s end came, suddenly and without warning, crushing him in the ruins of his burning cottage, where the desolate creature died as he had lived, uncared for and alone. Into Ruby’s heart a great, sorrowful regret has come, regret for a kind act left for ever undone, a kind word for ever unspoken.

“And I can never do it now!” the child sobs. “He’ll never even know I wanted to be kind to him!”

“Kind to whom, little girl?” her father asks wonderingly.

And it is in those kind arms that Ruby sobs out her story. “I can never do it now!” that is the burden of her sorrow.

The late Australian twilight gathers round them, and the stars twinkle out one by one. But, far away in the heaven which is beyond the stars and the dim twilight of this world, I think that God knows how one little girl, whose eyes are now dim with tears, tried to be “kind,” and it may be that in His own good time—and God’s time is always the best—He will let old Davis “know” also.