At last, however, Tracey had finished shoeing the coach-horse,
and Miss Grant, with part of her luggage, took a seat on the coach
behind five of Donohoe's worst horses, next to a well-dressed,
powerfully-built man of about five-and-twenty. He looked and talked
like a gentleman, and she heard the coachman address him as "Mr.
Blake." She and he shared the box-seat with the driver, and just
at the last moment the local priest hurried up and climbed on the
coach. In some unaccountable way he had missed hearing who the
young lady was, and for a time he could only look at her back-hair
and wonder.
It was not long before, in the free and easy Australian style, the
passengers began to talk to each other as the coach bumped along
its monotonous road--up one hill, through an avenue of dusty,
tired-looking gum-trees, down the other side through a similar
avenue, up another hill precisely the same as the last, and so on.
Blake was the first to make advances. "Not much to be seen on this
sort of journey, Miss Grant," he said.
The young lady looked at him with serious eyes. "No," she said,
"we've only seen two houses since we left the town. All the rest
of the country seems to be a wilderness."
Here the priest broke in. He was a broth of a boy from Maynooth,
just the man to handle the Doyle and Donohoe congregation.
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