woman, “and the way that precious baby takes to you, I don’t think I should be willing to say what I am going to do, miss.  Though my dear mistress wished it, and said, the very last night, ’You must tell her all about it, some day, Nana,’—­and I promised, to quiet her,—­I don’t think I could bring myself to it if I hadn’t lived with you and known you.”  And then the good nurse told her strange and moving tale.

She described how her master had come out young and careless-hearted to New Zealand in the service of the government, and how scandalised and angry his father and mother, the old Tory squire and his wife, had been to receive from him, after a year or two, letters brimming with a boyish love for his “beautiful Maori princess,” whom he described as having “the sweetest heart and the loveliest eyes in the world.”  It gave them little comfort to hear that her father was one of the wealthiest Maoris in the island, and that, though but half civilised himself, he had had his daughter well educated in the “bishop’s” and other English schools.  To them she was a savage.  There was no threat of disinheritance, for there was nothing for him to inherit.  There was little money, and the estate was entailed on the elder brother.  But all that could be done to intimidate him was done, and in vain.  Then silence fell between the parents and the son.

But one spring day came the news of a grandson, called Benjamin after his grandfather, and an urgent letter from their boy himself, enclosing a prettily and humbly worded note from the new strange daughter, begging for an English nurse.  She told them that she had now no father and no mother, for they had died before the baby came, and if she might love her husband’s parents a little she would be glad.

“My lady read the letters to me herself,” Mrs. Bentley said; “I’d taken the housekeeper’s place a bit before, and she asked me to find her a sensible young woman.  Well, I tried, but there wasn’t a girl in the place that was fit to nurse Master Horace’s child.  And the end of it was, I came myself, for Master Horace had been like my own when he was a little lad.  My lady pretended to be vexed with me, but the day I sailed she thanked me in words I never thought to hear from her, for she was a bit proud always.”  The faithful servant’s voice trembled.  She leaned back in her chair, and forgot for the moment the new house and the new duties.  She was back again in the old nursery with the fair-haired child playing about her knees.  But Alice’s face recalled her, and she continued the story.  She had, she said, dreaded the meeting with her new mistress, and was prepared to find her “a sort of a heathen woman, who’d pull down Master Horace till he couldn’t call himself a gentleman.”

But when she saw the graceful creature who received her with gentle words and gestures of kindliness, and when she found her young master not only content, but happy, and when she took in her arms the laughing healthy baby, she felt—­though she regretted its dark eyes and hair—­more at home than she could have believed possible.  The nurseries were so large and comfortable, and so much consideration was shown to her, that she confessed, “I should have been more ungrateful than a cat if I hadn’t settled comfortable.”