a dismal mess of it. The woman I trusted to'--he meant Mrs Hardacre--
'started feeding it with thick arrowroot. She'd have killed it to a
certainty."

"Indeed, yes. The idea! But it is incredible what some fools of women
can do in the way of mismanaging a baby." The remark implied expert
knowledge on the speaker's part.

"A mother of children herself, too," said Guthrie reflectively, "and
looking it, if ever a woman did. While a girl, who'd never had any,
took to the job like a duck to water--knew just what to do and how to
do it. I will say that for her." "Instinct," Miss Urquhart remarked to
the man in the moon, who seemed to survey the couple with his
tongue in his cheek. "I'm sure, though I say it, that I could give many
a mother points myself."

"I've no doubt you could. I heard somebody say, the other day, that
mothers are born, not made. Very true, too. You see it in the little
girls nursing their dolls. I don't think anything of a she-child that
doesn't want a doll as soon as it can speak." "I always loved them,"
declared Alice casually.

He leaned forward to look at a spider's web that the silver light had
just touched, making it shine out from its background of dark leaves
and verandah post; and there was danger of rupture to the delicate
thread of the topic that was weaving so charming a conversation.
Wherefore the young lady hastened to inquire what had become of his
little son.

"I suppose," she said, "he is with his mother's people?"