They exchanged opinions about her over their smoke at night by the huge open fireplace in the men's hut, where they sat in a semicircle, toasting their shins at the blaze till their trousers smoked again, each man with a pipe of black tobacco going full swing from tea till bedtime.

But the person who felt the most intense excitement over the arrival of the heiress was Miss Harriott.
For all her nurse's experience, Ellen Harriott was not a woman of the world.

Except for the period of her hospital training, she had passed all her life shut up among the mountains.

Her dream-world was mostly constructed out of high-class novels, and she united a shrewd wit and a clever brain to a dense ignorance of the real world, that left her like a ship without a rudder.

She was, like most bush-reared girls, a great visionary--many a castle-in-the-air had she built while taking her daily walk by the river under the drooping willows.