She blinked at him, and tried to rearrange her thoughts. She was excited, but she was frightened too, and Richard was all she had. The memory of their father's funeral, and she the only family member standing beside the minister, and of the small handful of servants and tenants whom she had known all her life and who were far away from her now, was still raw and recent. She didn't want to think about her new life; she wanted time to ease into it gradually. She wanted to pretend that she was a tourist. "Dickie—Dick, what do you mean?"
Richard must have seen the homesick bewilderment on her face. He looked back at her unhappily. "Oh—er—it's not your house, you know."
"Of course I know that!" she exclaimed. "I appreciate what the Greenoughs are doing for you and for me by—by taking me in." And she added carefully: "You explained all that to me in your letter."
He nodded.
"Do you think I don't know how to behave myself?" she said at last, goaded, and was rewarded by another long silence while she felt the blood rising in her face.
"It's not that I don't think you know how," he said at last. She flinched, and he began: "An—"
"Harry," she said firmly. "It's still Harry." He looked at her with dismay, and she realized that she was confirming his fears about her, but she wasn't going to yield about that of all things. The realization that she would insist on being called Harry seemed to silence him, because he did not try to reason with her further, but withdrew into his corner seat and stared out the window.
She could tell by his voice that he did not want to hurt her, but that he was truly apprehensive. She and Richard had been wild animals together as small children; but when Dickie had been packed off to school, their mother had dragged her into the house, mostly by the ears or the nape of the neck, and begun the long difficult process of reforming her into something resembling a young lady.
"I suppose I should have started years ago," she told her sulky daughter; "but you were having such a good time, and I knew Dickie would be sent away soon. I thought it hardly fair that your lessons should start sooner." This lifted the cloud a little from her daughter's brow, so she added with a smile, "And, besides, I've always liked riding horses and climbing trees and falling into ponds better myself." After such an open avowal of sympathy from the enemy, lessons could never be quite awful; on the other hand, they were not perhaps as thorough as they might have been. On particularly beautiful days they often packed a lunch and rode out together, mother and daughter, to inspire themselves—the mother said—with a little fresh air; but the books as often as not stayed in the saddlebags all day. The daughter learned to love books, particularly adventure novels where the hero rode a beautiful horse and ran all the villains through with his silver sword, but her embroidery was never above passable; and she only learned to dance after her mother pointed out that such grace and balance as she might learn on the dance floor would doubtless stand her in good stead in the saddle. She learned the housekeeping necessary in an old ramshackle country house well enough to take over the management of theirs successfully during her mother's last illness; and the first horrible months after her mother's death were made easier by the fact that she had something to do. As the first pain of loss wore away, she realized also that she liked being useful.
In the shock five years later of her father's death, and with the knowledge that she must leave her home, and leave it in the indifferent hands of a business manager, it had occurred to her to be relieved that the little eastern station at the farthest-flung border of the Homelander empire where Richard had been posted, and where she was about to join him, was as small and isolated as it was. Her mother had escorted her to such small parties and various social occasions as their country neighborhood might offer, and while she knew she had "conducted herself creditably" she had not enjoyed herself. For one thing, she was simply too big: taller than all the women, taller than most of the men.
Harry could get nothing more useful out of her brother about his private misgivings as the small rickety train carried them north. So she began to ask general questions—a tourist's questions—about her new country; and then she had better luck. Richard began visibly to thaw, for he recognized the sincerity of her interest, and told her quite cheerfully that the town at the end of their journey, where Sir Charles and Lady Amelia awaited them, was the only town of any size at all within three days of it. "There's a wireless station out in the middle of nowhere where the train stops—it exists only for the train to have someplace to stop—and that's all." The town's name was Istan, after the natives' Ihistan, which was deemed too hard to pronounce. Beyond Istan was a scattering of small depressed cottages in carefully irrigated fields where a tough local tassel-headed grain called korf was grown. Istan had been a small village before the Homelanders came, where the farmers and herders and nomads from the surrounding country came to market every fortnight and a few pot-menders and rug-weavers kept shops. The Homelanders used it as an outpost, and expanded it, although the native marketplace remained at its center; and built a fort at the eastern edge of it, which was named the General Leonard Ernest Mundy.
Istan had lately become a place of some importance in the governmental network the Homelanders had laid over the country they had conquered eighty years before. It was still an isolated spot, and no one went there who didn't have to; for it was at the edge of the great northern desert of the peninsular continent the Homelanders called Daria. But thirteen years ago the Aeel Mines had been discovered in the Ramid Mountains to the northwest, and in the last eight years the Mines had been officially declared the most profitable discovery on the entire Darian continent, and that was saying a great deal. The profits on oranges alone paid the wages of half the civil servants in the Province.
"The Mines are awful to get to, though; the Ramids are very nasty going. Istan is on the only feasible route to the Mines, and is the last town large enough to re-supply any caravan or company going that way or coming back out again. That's why we got the railroad, finally. Before that we were the only reason anyone would want to come so far, and our attractions are limited. But the Mines are the big thing now. They may even figure out a way to dig a road through the Ramids. I wish them luck."
Istan also remained tactically important, for while south of it the boundary to Homelander territory swung rapidly east, the Homelanders failed to push it back any nearer the mountains of the north and east. The natives, perhaps from learning to cope with the desert to survive at all, had proved to be a tougher breed than their southern cousins.