blue eyes stared at the strange
crowd stolidly for several minutes before he suddenly crumpled up his
face and uttered a howl of terror.

"What is it?" queried Dalzell, with raised brows, pretending that he
had never seen such a thing before.

"It's a baby," Frances explained, dancing round it. "Baby!
Baby!"--shaking the new rattle that was one of its Christmas
gifts--"look at me, baby! It is Mr Carey's baby. Oh, come and speak to
him, Mr Carey! He is frightened of so many strangers."

The stalwart father in the background glowered upon the son disgracing
him. Red as beetroot, embarrassed and annoyed, he strode forward. The
yelling infant cast one glance at him, and yelled louder than before.
"I shouldn't have let him come," the sailor growled. He had got up from
the wrong side of the bed that morning, and was in the mood to regret
everything, even that he had been born. "I don't know what possessed me
to let you be bothered with the brat. I'll ring for his nurse."

This was unanimously objected to. The ladies gathered round, with
honeyed words and tinkling baubles to pacify the little guest. Deborah
snatched him from her sister's arms, and ran with him into the garden,
where she tossed him, still writhing and wailing, up and down, and
dipped his face into flowers, and played other pranks calculated to
enchant the average baby. This baby turned on her for her pains, and
having slapped her cheeks, grabbed her beautiful hair and tore it down
about her ears. The next instant he felt the weight of the hand from
which his own had derived its strength.

"You brute!" cried Deb, shielding the offending little arm from a
second blow. "A great big man like you, to strike a tender mite like
this!"

"'Tender' is hardly the word," the irate parent sneered. "And mite as
he is, he is not to do things of that sort." Guthrie glared at her
sacred locks, dishevelled. "I'm awfully sorry. He shan't do it again.
I'll take him away tomorrow."

"You will do nothing of the sort," flashed Deb. "You are not fit to
have the care of him. He shall stay here, where he will be treated as a
baby ought to be--not smacked and knocked about for nothing at all."

"I admire his pluck," quoth Dalzell, sauntering up.

"So do I," said Deb; but she handed her sobbing burden to Mary. "Here,
take him, Moll, while I put my hair up. POOR little fellow!"

She need not have been so severe. She might have known that it was
because the cheeks and hair were