“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 somebody say, the other day, that mothers are born, not made.  Very true, too.  You see it in the little girls nursing their dolls.  I don’t think anything of a she-child that doesn’t want a doll as soon as it can speak.”  “I always loved them,” declared Alice casually.

He leaned forward to look at a spider’s web that the silver light had just touched, making it shine out from its background of dark leaves and verandah post; and there was danger of rupture to the delicate thread of the topic that was weaving so charming a conversation.  Wherefore the young lady hastened to inquire what had become of his little son.

“I suppose,” she said, “he is with his mother’s people?”

Slowly resuming his attitude of repose, the guest considered the question.