“Well, we’ve had a night of it, eh?” he said kindly.  “Funny how much one takes the little beggars for grawnted until it’s one’s own that kicks up the row?  You’ve not seen her—­she’s a nice little beggar.  You might get some sleep, I should think.  I’m going to hang around until some sort of a family jamboree is over, at one o’clock—­your mother insists that we have dinner—­and then I’ll go out to the rawnch.  But I’ll be in in the morning!”

“Girl!” said Clara, apologetically, whimsically, deprecatingly, her weak fingers clinging tightly to his.

“Ah, well, one carn’t help that!” he answered philosophically.  “We’ll have a row of jolly little chaps yet!”

But there was never another child.  Clara, having cast her fortunes in with her lord, was faithful to him through every breath she drew.  But before Rachael’s first crying, feverish little summer was over there had been some definite changes at the ranch.  Thomas was gone, and Clara, pale and exhausted with the heat, engaged Ella, a young woman servant of her mother’s selecting, to bake and wash and carry in stove-wood.  Clara managed them all, Gerald, the baby, and the maid.  Perhaps at first she was just a little astonished to find her husband as easily managed as Ella and far more easily managed than Rachael.  Gerald Fairfax was surprised, too, lazily conceding his altered little wife her new and energetic way with a mental reservation that when she was strong and well again and the child less a care, things would be as they were.  But Clara, once in power, never weakened for a moment again.  Rachael grew up, a solitary and unfriendly, yet a tactful and diplomatic, little person on the ranch.  She early developed a great admiration for her father, and a consequent regard for herself as superior to her associates.  She ruled her mother absolutely from her fourth year, and remained her grandmother’s great favorite among a constantly increasing flock of grandchildren.  Some innate pride and scorn and dignity in the child won her her own way through school and school days; her young cousins were bewildered themselves by the respect and fealty they yielded her despite the contempt in which they held her affectations.

Clara had never been a religious woman and, married to an utter unbeliever, she had little enough to give a child of her own.  But Clara’s mother was a church woman, and her father a deeply religious man.  It was his mother, “old lady Mumford”—­Rachael’s great-grandmother—­who taught the child her catechism whenever she could get hold of that restless and lawless little girl.