several children; but Alice, the eldest of the family, was the general
manager of her household, ever struggling with her brother, who
maintained it, to lift it and herself out of the ruts in which her
father had left it stuck. She was close on thirty, sad to say, and
there were three girls below her; and nothing happened from year
to year, and she was weary of the monotony. "Do come and see us," she
wrote to Guthrie Carey--one of the finest-looking men she had ever
known, not excepting the splendid Claud Dalzell--"do come and see us,
and bring the baby. Country air will do it good, and the house is full
of nurses for it."

He went himself, out of friendship for Jim, and after dinner sat in the
verandah with Alice, and explained why he had not brought the baby. Jim
had then gone off to doctor a sick horse, and Mrs Urquhart was putting
children to bed.

"I believe," Alice rallied him, "that you thought it INFRA DIG."

He protested earnestly that she was wrong. No, it was not that--not
THAT.

Ignorant of the details of the tragedy of his life, she scented a
mystery about the child. Was it, perhaps, not right in its head, she
wondered--or afflicted with a hare lip?

"Son or daughter?" she ventured cautiously. "A boy," said Guthrie
Carey, still with that unfatherly air of discontent. "Sometimes I wish
it was a girl. She could look after me by-and-by; I could have her
trained to be my housekeeper, and sew my buttons on--that sort of
thing, you know."