Among the inhabitants of Sydney who made daily moan against the slow severity of the hopeless season (and who had in some cases good cause, in diminished incomes and receding trade, for such murmurings), Paul Frankston, to his great surprise, found his daughter to be enrolled. This occurrence, involving as he thought a radical change of disposition, if not of character, much alarmed the worthy merchant. Calm and resolute, if occasionally variant of mood, Antonia Frankston had hitherto been one of the least querulous of mortals. Sufficiently cultured to comprehend that the stupendous laws of the universe were not controlled by the fancied woe or weal of feeble man, she had never sympathised with the unmeaning deprecation of climatic occurrences. ‘The wind and the weather are in God’s hands,’ she had once answered to some shallow complainer. ‘What are we that we should dare to blame or praise? Besides, I am a sailor’s daughter, and at sea they take the weather as it comes.’ In other matters, which could be set right by personal supervision or self-denial, she held it to be most unworthy weakness to make bitter outcry or vain lamentation. ‘If the evil can be repaired, why not at once commence the task? If hopeless, then bear it with firmness. Provide against its recurrence, if you like; but, in any case, what possible good can talking or, more correctly, whining do? That is the reason why men so often despise women, so often suffer from them. Look at _them_ when anything goes wrong,—how hard they work, how little they talk! Perhaps they smoke the more. But even that has the virtue of silence, and therefore of wisdom. Talk is a very good thing in the right place, but when things go wrong, it is _not_ in its right place.’ In former days of autumn, when the rains came not, when the flowers drooped, when bad news came from Paul Frankston’s pastoral constituents, and that worthy financier was troubled in mind, or smoked more than his proper allowance of cigars over the consideration of the state of trade, it was Antonia who invariably cheered and consoled him. She pointed out the triumphs of the past; she steadfastly counselled trust in the future; she soothed the night with her songs; she cheered the day with unfailing ministration to his comfort and habitudes. Now, curiously, the old man thought his darling was different from what he had ever recollected. She suffered repinings to escape her as to the weary rainless season. She did not deny or controvert his occasional grumbling assertions, after a hot day in the city, that the whole country was going to the bad. She was, wonder of wonders, occasionally irritable with the servants, and impatient of their shortcomings. She kept her books unchanged and apparently unread for a time unprecedented in Mr. Shaddock’s experience.