dmire.

But it was a very damp, miserable drive, and the General wept with
hardly a break from start to finish, greatly to Esther's vexation,
for it was his first introduction to his grandfather.

At last, when everyone was beginning to feel the very end of patience
had come, a high white gate broke the monotony of dripping wet
fences.

"Home!" Esther said joyfully. She jumped the General up and down on
her knee.

"Little Boy Blue, Mum fell off that gate when she was three," said she,
looking at it affectionately as Pip swung it open.

Splash through the rain again; the wheels went softly now, for the
way was covered with wet fallen leaves.

"Oh, where IS the house?" Bunty said, peeping through Pip's arm
on the box seat, and seeing still nothing but an endless vista of
gum trees. "I thought, you said we were there, Esther."

"Oh, the front door is not quite so near the gate as at Misrule,"
she said. And indeed it was not.

It was fifteen minutes before they even saw the chimneys, then there
was another gate to be opened. A gravel drive now trimly kept,
high box round the flower-beds, a wilderness of rose bushes that
pleased Meg's eye, two chip tennis-courts under water.

Then the house.

The veranda was all they noticed; such a wide one it was, as wide as
an ordinary room, and there were lounges and chairs and tables
scattered about, hammocks swung from the corners, and a green thick
creeper with rain-blown wisteria for an outer wall.

"O--o--oh," said Pip; "o--oh! I AM stiff--o--oh, I say, what are you
doing?"

For Esther had deposited her infant on his knee, and leapt out of
the waggonette and up the veranda steps.

There was a tiny old lady there, with a great housekeeping apron
on. Esther gathered her right up in her arms, and they kissed and
clung to each other till they were both crying.

"My little girl!" sobbed the little old lady, stroking, with eager
hands, Esther's wet hair and wetter cheeks.

And Bunty, who had followed close behind, looked from the tall figure
of his stepmother to the very small one of her mother and laughed.

Esther darted back to the buggy, took the General from Pip, and,
springing up the steps again, placed him in her mother's arms.

"Isn't he a fat 'un!" Bunty said, sharing in her pride; "just you
look at his legs."

The old lady sat down for one minute in the wettest chair she could
find, and cuddled him close up to her.

But he doubled his little cold f