eks altogether--with his heart in his wife's grave, and with
that pathetic adjunct, a baby. When he would consent to recognise the
world of affairs again, and the claims of youth and manhood against it,
he found--but of course there is no need to specify all the things he
found.

One was a batch of invitations awaiting each arrival of his ship in
port--first two, then four, then half-a-dozen women's notes, begging
him to come to as many hospitable houses for change and rest, and to
"bring the baby". He could not bring the baby, for reasons which he did
not honestly present, as a rule, but which he reluctantly disclosed to
Alice Urquhart one night at Five Creeks. Alice had written one of the
six notes (they were six because it was Christmas time), for she was
the sister of Jim Urquhart, who was the friend of an ex-squatter down
on his luck through droughts, and reduced to balancing ledgers in a
Melbourne office, who was the friend of one of those doctors of
Williamstown whose skill had brought Guthrie Carey to life after he had
been drowned. Jim, having made the acquaintance of the latter, took his
sister to inspect the ship, and to have tea in the mate's cabin; hence
the return visit, which the captain, who loved his chief officer,
stretched a point to sanction.

There were at Five Creeks station, besides Jim, a Mrs Urquhart and
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,