Mary, though she was not Deb, was too sweet and good for words.  She put the little hired girl on the front seat with the groom, and sat in the body of the waggonette to talk to Guthrie and to take care of his child.  There was no awkward shyness on her part now, and no boredom on his.  Little Harry fused them.  She had remembered to bring fresh milk and rusks for a possibly hungry baby, and he sat on her lap as she fed him, and cooed to her when his mouth was not too full, and seemed to forget that any other foster-mother had ever existed.  His father’s relieved and astonished pleasure in the sight was only equalled by Mary’s pleasure in seeing his pleasure.  “Isn’t he a jolly little cuss, Miss Pennycuick?” “He is a perfect darling,” crooned Mary, kissing him.

And, in fact, Harry Carey was a fine, clean, wholesome child, as worthy of his old family as any born under the ancestral roof.

Mary shouldered him as if he belonged to her when they arrived at Redford, shortly before the dinner hour.

“Now, Mr Carey, you must go to the bachelors’ quarters, I am sorry to say; but he will not miss you, since you have been away from him for so long.  He knows me now,” said Mary proudly, “and I will take charge of him.  You may safely leave him to us now.”

“Indeed, yes, I know that,” said the thankful parent, and hastened to his new quarters to receive the greetings and chaffings of the young bachelors, and to dress himself for dinner, while Mary carried the baby into the house, calling on Keziah Moon to come to her, the inadequate nurse-girl trailing at her heels.

The house party gathered in the glazed corridor of the “middle part”—­ a long, narrow room, that had once been a verandah, and that led to the new big dining-room—­to await the summons to the meal.  Here Deb, beautiful in limp white silk that showed up the lovely carmine of her cheeks, came forward to welcome the returned guest with an eager warmth that sadly misled him.  He sat down to his dinner a few minutes later with his head in a whirl and his appetite nowhere, as an effect of that cordial pressure of the hand, those tender eyes, and that deep-hued blush upon him.

Then, as he came to himself, there crept into his mind a sense that things had been happening while he was away.  All the eyes around the table seemed continually to turn either towards Deb, who, still flushed, and bestowing absent-minded smiles upon anybody and anything, was certainly different from her usual stately self; or upon Claud Dalzell, who sat beside her, and seemed to have appropriated some of her lost dignity; or upon Mr Pennycuick, who fumbled oddly with carving knife and gravy spoon, and gave other evidences, Guthrie thought, of having been upset and shaken.  The young man was still fumbling himself for light upon these mysteries, when they were dispelled by a shock that for the moment stunned him.

Mr Pennycuick called for a certain brand of wine long famous at his board.  When it came, and the bottles were being sent round, he stood up, with a trembling goblet in his hand.  The eyes round the table dropped—­all but Guthrie’s, which stared at the old man.