In three weeks she was about the house again, thin and great-eyed, but full of nonsense and even mischief once more.  The doctor’s visits ceased; he said she had made a good recovery so far, but should have change of surroundings, and be taken a long way from sea air.

“Let her run wild for some months, Woolcot,” he said at his last visit; “it will take time to quite shake off all this and get her strength and flesh back again.”

“Certainly, certainly; she shall go at once,” the Captain said.

He could not forget he shock he had received in the old loft five or six weeks ago, and would have agreed if he had been bidden to take her for a sojourn in the Sahara.

The doctor had told him the mischief done to her lungs was serious.

“I won’t say she will ultimately die of consumption,” he had said, “but there is always a danger of that vile disease in these nasty cases.  And little Miss Judy is such a wild, unquiet subject; she seems to be always in a perfect fever of living, and to possess a capacity for joy and unhappiness quite unknown to slower natures.  Take care of her, Woolcot, and she’ll make a fine woman some day—­ay, a grand woman.”

The Captain smoked four big cigars in the solitude of his study before he could decide how he could best “take care of her.”

At first he thought he would send her with Meg and the governess to the mountains for a time, but then there was the difficulty about lessons for the other three.  He might send them to school, or engage a governess certainly, but then again there was expense to be considered.

It was out of the question for the girls to go alone, for Meg had shown herself nothing but a silly little goose, in spite of her sixteen years; and Judy needed attention.  Then he remembered Esther, too, was, looking unwell; the nursing and the General together had been too much for her, and she looked quite a shadow of her bright self.  He knew he really ought to send her, too, and the child, of course.

And again the expense.

He remembered the Christmas holidays were not very far away; what would become of the house with Pip and Bunty and the two youngest girls running wild, and no one in authority?  He sighed heavily, and knocked the ash from his fourth cigar upon the carpet.

Then the postman came along the drive and past the window.  He poked up with a broad smile, and touched his helmet in a pleased kind of way.  If almost seemed as if he knew that in one of the letters he held the solution of the problem that was making the Captain’s brow all criss-crossed with frowning lines.

A fifth cigar was being extracted from the case, a wrinkle was deepening just over the left eyebrow, a twinge of something very like gout was calling forth a word or two of “foreign language,” when Esther came in with a smile on her lips and an open letter in her hands.

“From Mother,” she said.  “Yarrahappini’s a wilderness, it seems, and she wants me to go up, and take the General with me, for a few weeks.”