“Nor could you have had a bonnier face to look into,” added the Colonel.  “There, the game breaks up.  We should collect our flock, and get them them back to Les Invalides, as Alick calls it.”

“Take care no one else does so,” said Ermine, laughing.  “It has been a most happy day, and chief of all the pleasures has been the sight of Rachel just what I hoped, a thorough wife and mother, all the more so for her being awake to larger interests, and doing common things better for being the Clever Woman of the family.  Where is she?  I don’t see her now.”

Where is she? was asked by more than one of the party, but the next to see her was Alick, who found her standing at the window of her own room, with her long-robed, two-months’ old baby in her arms.  “Tired?” he asked.

“No; I only sent down nurse to drink tea with the other grandees.  What a delightful day it has been!  I never hoped that such good fruit would rise out of my unhappy blunders.”

“The blunders that brought so much good to me.”

“Ah! the old places bring them back again.  I have been recollecting how it used to seem to me the depth of my fall that you were marrying me out of pure pity, without my having the spirit to resent or prevent it, and now I just like to think how kind and noble it was in you.”

“I am glad to hear it!  I thought I was so foolishly in love, that I was very glad of any excuse for pressing it on.”

“Are the people dispersing?  Where is your uncle?”

“He went home with the Colonel and his wife; he has quite lost his heart to Ermine.”

“And Una—­did you leave her with Grace?”

“No, she trotted down hand in hand with his little lordship:  promising to lead her uncle back.”

“My dear Alick, you don’t mean that you trust to that?”

“Why, hardly implicitly.”

“Is that the way you say so?  They may be both over the cliffs.  If you will just stay in the room with baby, I will go down and fetch them up.”

Alick very obediently held out his arms for his son, but when Rachel proceeded to take up her hat, he added, “You have run miles enough to-day.  I am going down as soon as my uncle has had time to pay his visit in peace, without being hunted.”

“Does he know that?”

“The Colonel does, which comes to the same thing.  Is not this boy just of the age that little Keith was when you gave him up?”

“Yes; and is it not delightful to see how much larger and heavier he is!”

“Hardly, considering your objections to fine children.”

“Oh, that was only to coarse, over-grown ones.  Una is really quite as tall as little Keith, and much more active.  You saw he could not play at the game at all, and she was all life and enjoyment, with no notion of shyness.”

“It does not enter into her composition.”

“And she speaks much plainer.  I never miss a word she says, and I don’t understand Keith a bit, though he tells such long stories.”