h he were the channel of
her husband's. This state of things ended with the birth of the little
girl, the daughter that Sir Stephen had so much wished for, coming too
late to be welcomed by him, but awakening her mother to tearful joy and
renewed powers of life. The nine months of little Stephana's life
had been a tone of continual change and variety, of new interests and
occupations, and of the resumption of a feeling of health which had
scarcely been tasted since the first plunge into warm climates. Perhaps
it was unreasonable to expect to find Fanny broken down; and she
talked in her own simple way with abundant overflowing affection of her
husband; but even Mrs. Curtis thought it was to her more like the loss
of her own father than of the father of her children; and though not in
the least afraid of anything unbecoming in her gentle, retiring Fanny,
still felt that it was more the charge of a girl than of a widow,
dreaded the boys, dreaded their fate, and dreaded the Major more.

During this drive, Grace and Rachel had the care of the elder boys, whom
Rachel thought safer in her keeping than in Coombe's. A walk along
the cliffs was one resource for their amusement, but it resulted in
Conrade's climbing into the most break-neck places, by preference
selecting those that Rachel called him out of, and as all the others
thought it necessary to go after him, the jeopardy of Leoline and Hubert
became greater than it was possible to permit; so Grace took them by the
hands, and lured them home with promises of an introduction to certain
white rabbits at the lodge. After their departure, their brothers became
infinitely more obstreperous. Whether it were that Conrade had some
slight amount of consideration for the limbs of his lesser followers, or
whether the fact were--what Rachel did not remotely imagine--that he was
less utterly unmanageable with her sister than with herself, certain
it is that the brothers went into still more intolerable places, and
treated their guardian as ducklings treat an old hen. At last they quite
disappeared from the view round a projecting point of rock, and when
she turned it, she found a battle royal going on over an old
lobster-pot--Conrade hand to hand with a stout fisher-boy, and Francis
and sundry amphibious creatures of both sexes exchanging a hail of
stones, water-smoothed brick-bats, cockle-shells, fishes' backbones, and
other unsavoury missiles. Abstractedly, Rachel had her theory that