A hurried letter was despatched to David’s doctor, asking endless questions, pledging him to secrecy, and urging him to wire an answer C. O. D. Little Julia was instructed as to her mother’s charms and her father’s virtues far beyond the point of her comprehension.  And Jerry spent long hours with Connie in the car, explaining its mechanism, and making her a really proficient driver, although she had been very skilful behind the wheel before.  Also, he wrote long letters to his dealer in Denver, giving him such a host of minute instructions that the bewildered agent thought the “old gent in Des Moines had gone daft.”

Carol wrote every day, pitifully, jubilantly, begging Connie to hurry and get started, admonishing her to take a complete line of snapshots of every separate Starr, to count each additional gray hair in darling father’s head, and to locate every separate dimple in Julia’s fat little body.  And every letter was answered by every one of the family, who interrupted themselves to urge everybody else not to give anything away, and to be careful what they said.  And they all cried over Julia, and over Carol’s letters, and even cried over the beautiful assortment of clothes they had accumulated for Carol, using Lark as a sewing model.

Twenty minutes after the train left Mount Mark, came a telegram from Carol:  “Did she get off all right?  Did anything happen?  Wire immediately.”  And the whole family rushed off to separate rooms to weep all over again.

But Aunt Grace walked slowly about the house, gathering up blocks, and headless dolls, and tailless dogs, and laying them carefully away in a drawer until little Julia should return to visit the family in Mount Mark.

For the doctor had said it was all right to restore the baby to her heart-hungering parents in the mountain land.  Carol was fairly strong, David was fairly well.  The baby being healthy, and the parents being sanitary, the danger to its tiny lungs was minimized,—­and by all means send them the baby.

So Julia was arrayed in matchless garments destined to charm the eyes of the parents, who, in their happiness, would never realize it had any clothes on at all, and Connie set out upon her journey with the little girl in her charge.

On Tuesday morning, Carol was a mental wreck.  She forgot to salt David’s eggs, and gave him codeine for his cough instead of tonic tablets for his appetite.  She put no soda in the hot cakes, and made his egg-nog of buttermilk.  She laughed out loud when David was asking the blessing, and when he wondered how tall Julia was she burst out crying, and then broke two glasses in her energetic haste to cover up the emotional outbreak.  Altogether it was a most trying morning.  She was ready to meet the train exactly two hours and a half before it was due, and she combed David’s hair three times, and whenever she couldn’t sit still another minute she got up and dusted the railing around the porch, brushed off his lounging jacket, and rearranged the roses in the vase on his table.