"Run down to the luggage van and have your trunks brought up here.
Then they can go up to the school with ours. There's plenty of time.
Paddy will be some while fetching Orpheus along with the truck; he
always crawls about like a snail."
As Kitty obediently went off down the platform with her long strides,
many of the girls turned round to stare after her as she passed, for
she was far from being an insignificant girl. She was tall,
long-legged, and at a rather bony and angular stage of growth. Her
face was very tanned after the sea voyage and, like the majority of
Australian girls, her complexion was nothing to boast about; she had
cropped, bright brown hair and alert grey-blue eyes; there was
something in her carriage and the active swing of her walk that
betrayed an outdoor life with plenty of exercise.
"This is yours, miss," said the porter obligingly. "For the school,
miss? Here's another one for the school. Take them both up the
platform, Tom."
The second trunk, as Kitty noticed with a quick observant glance, was
very smart and expensive looking; and painted in white very
conspicuously across the top, in great contrast to Kitty's humble
initials, were these words: "The Hon. Duane l'Estrange Estevan."
Kitty was immensely tickled.
"My gracious!" she said to herself. "What a name! If it were mine I
should want to drown it. An Honourable, too. I sort of think, if I
run across her, I shan't hit it off with the Hon. Duane l'Estrange
Estevan. That is to say, if she's anything like her trunk, or her
name."
Australians are far less tolerant in their criticisms than the
English, and Kitty was no exception, you see.
Returning to Eileen and her party, she found that a little shambling
man was loading a truck with the girls' hand luggage.
"Come along now," said Paddy. "We can leave these things to Orpheus.
We call him Orpheus," she explained to Kitty, "because he blows the
chapel organ. He's got an undeveloped cerebrum, you know, poor chap."
"Please, Paddy," remonstrated Salome. "We're not in school yet!"
"Well, dippy on the dome then, if that's more suited to your
intelligence," retorted Paddy recklessly.
They set off from the station, Salome and Eileen leading the way,
Paddy and Kitty following, and the younger ones trailing along
behind. They passed through the small town of Easthampton and after
half a mile's walk they arrived at Easthampton College. Kitty's
first glimpse of that famous school was an imposing pair of iron
gates with a view beyond of trim shrubberies and lawns, a curving
drive, a pleasant red-bricked house, and a background of green
fields. The gates were open.
"Easthampton is quite a little colony of itself," said Salome,
turning to Kitty with a smile. "There are nearly three hundred girls
in the school, quite two hundred being yearly boarders."
"How many houses are there?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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