perhaps, not right in its head, she
wondered--or afflicted with a hare lip?

"Son or daughter?" she ventured cautiously. "A boy," said Guthrie
Carey, still with that unfatherly air of discontent. "Sometimes I wish
it was a girl. She could look after me by-and-by; I could have her
trained to be my housekeeper, and sew my buttons on--that sort of
thing, you know."

"You would have to wait a long time," said Alice, turning admiring eyes
upon his comely person, noting with regret that he could not be within
several years of her own age. "It is quite a young infant, isn't it?"

"Yes; that is--let me see--fifteen months and a little over. Yes, it
will be fifteen months on Thursday since he lost his mother." Time had
done so much for him that he could now speak of her to a stranger. "And
he was then only a few weeks old."

"Poor, poor little thing!" sighed Alice Urquhart.

It was, by the way, a particularly sympathetic night--soft, still,
solitary, with a full moon. They both felt it. Besides, he had had an
excellent dinner. Five Creeks was poor, but it lived well.

"Oh," laughed the guest, without merriment in his laugh, "you needn't
waste pity on HIM, Miss Urquhart; he's all right. Rolls in fat--never
ailed a thing in his life--might take the prize at a baby show. So they
tell me. I have not seen him myself for a good while."

"What! Why, he's in Melbourne, isn't he?"

"Not far out."

"And you haven't been home to see him?"

"I haven't got a home. I gave it up when--you know. I knew I should
never be there, and you can't leave a house and a young child to
servants. The little time that I did try to carry on by myself, I made
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 som