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Careless as to whether his father should set him up or down, Philip had determined to start driving a new line of coaches from Maneroo to one of the down-country townships. The Pools were to supply horses and have a share in the venture. Charlotte was to remain and conduct her father's house as before. Pool Senior was glad to retain her, for the next girl, Ada, had not her sister's capacity. She was accused of being lackadaisical. Certainly she was frail, but any woman in those days who had not given birth to a large family and fended for them without sparing herself was considered lackadaisical. Likewise, any man who could not fence, or plough, or build, or muster and draft and brand, and perform many other similar tasks from dawn till dark, six and frequently seven days a week, was a "poor crawler".

Both Charlotte and Bert were sensitive about their humble status and eager to imbibe self-improvement through every pore of their beings. They had no sooner returned from Mungee than they started their operations. The garden was enlarged, laid out properly and fenced; the few fruit trees planted from seeds by heroic old Mrs Pool were pruned and dug; the front room was ceiled, cracks in the walls were filled up and papered like those at Mungee, and the shortage of furniture made up by Bert's very creditable carpentering attempts. Old Pool let them alone as long as they did not worry him and continued to supply his meagre wants. He even contributed Bert to the household campaign for many days, and went out on the run accompanied only by Jim, aged eleven and a half, and Harry, a capable stockman of ten years.

A decision was made by Charlotte to procure a governess for the younger ones and was acted upon forthwith. But the first incumbent and her half-dozen successors fled in horror from the loneliness and primitiveness of the place, with its undisciplined children and the forbidding aspect of their father, with his one eye, his great size and his wild black beard and hair.

At last one came who remained. She was a woman in her forties, lacking in beauty but dowered with more durable qualities. She fitted into Charlotte and Bert's campaign miraculously. She was capable of imparting what she knew. She was experienced in teaching drawing, the piano and French as well as her own language, and she enjoyed bringing her pupils on. No passivity of temperament restrained her from reorganisation; she had to improve her charges or explode. This was providential in light of the challenge of the untamed Pool ménage and, with Bert and Charlotte on her every hand, things went with a swing.

The children were yarded under Miss Mayborn's dictatorship. The boys kept their boots on in her sight, and the girls adopted theirs permanently. They all washed their persons regularly, and the girls learned to rule their tresses, and to sew for themselves garments cut out by their capable instructress. Further, instead of taking to the woods at the sight of a stranger, trembling like pursued bandicoots and shyly examining the visitant from behind a gum tree or through the cracks of their habitation (now, thankfully, plugged up), they soon learned to offer hospitality unfearfully when rare callers appeared. With Charlotte and Bert, now quite intolerant of any waywardness, to police them, the poor youngsters never dared to be slack or fractious, no matter how exacting was Miss Mayborn.

Philip saw Charlotte only on Sundays and, to take advantage of the time that he was absent, Charlotte decided to ask Miss Mayborn if she would teach her and Bert in the winter evenings. Miss Mayborn was enthusiastic, and it was testimony to her quality that it never occurred to her to exact any tribute for the extra work involved.

Long days in the saddle chasing wild cattle or horses, branding them, breaking them for domestic use, splitting rails and slabs for home paddocks or additions to the homestead, and all the other arduous work that such a life involved, made Bert rather a sleepy pupil in the evenings. But he was game and persevering and eventually emerged from the ordeal with enough figuring to keep accounts, enough writing to manage his correspondence, enough reading to master the up-country press and to decipher—not without a struggle if they were handscript—the circulars and government notices which in due course were to devolve upon him.

This education was enough to put him on a level with, and above, some of the most successful and socially honoured of his contemporaries up the country. Charlotte made somewhat better progress, being in the house by day and not being above an hour with the younger scholars when her duties permitted.

Miss Mayborn continued at her post to the astonishment of the district. Just why was her secret.

Harriet Mayborn had been reared with all the refinements of the professional classes of the old country, her father being a canon of the Church of England and the nephew of a baronet. But then a criminal act of which her brother was convicted after a notorious court case broke up the home, killed her mother and ruined her father, of whom Harriet eventually became the sole support. When at last free and entering on her forties, she decided to cut old and painful associations and bury herself in Australia. But on her arrival she struck the financial panic of 1842-43 and, with many younger and more prepossessing candidates vying for positions, she found it hard to obtain a post in or around Sydney. Worse, when she finally did so, she was in danger of meeting someone who was acquainted with the details of the unsavoury Mayborn case. That is why she retreated up the country.

The illiterate Pools had never heard the name of Mayborn, and this commended them to her. She had found a refuge where no one seemed to realise that she had ever been possessed of parents or a brother, or to be curious as to how they had lived and died.

She liked Charlotte and Bert from the start. Their eagerness to improve themselves, and the reverence in which they held her was soothing to her unhappy soul. As time went by, it became evident that all that was wrong with the Pools was lack of opportunity, and that while they were totally uncultivated, they were neither irreverent nor indifferent towards matters of social refinement. She enjoyed her rapid progress in turning these young colonials into a semblance of respectable young people at Home. There was relief in the fact that there was no parental interference, and there was balm in the children's spontaneous friendliness. Their eagerness to give without reservation or any eye to profit revived her long dormant affections. They taught her to sit on a horse, and took her for bogeys in the swimming hole; they caught the pretty spotted native cats and tanned the skins to make a tippet and muff for her.

Thus she stayed and, staying, found peace and refuge and scope for her energies, while the lonely children expanded in her warm, constructive interest in their undertakings and exploits.

She was interested in all that she was told of the Mazeres and recognised in Philip Junior a gentleman according to colonial standards. But in no way did she recognise the social gradations of squattocracy. One colonial seemed as good as another to her, and so they mostly were. Superiority generally existed more in a particular family's perception of itself than in a consensus of the district's opinion. In Harriet Mayborn's opinion, the colonials were all below the salt, for she was a thorough-paced, narrow-minded snob only displaced from her natural element by disaster. It was fortunate that the Pools had experienced so little contact with their fellow human beings that they were quite oblivious to her view of them.