shing up a few cups
and spoons--pooh! How'd you like to be me and have to clean all the
knives, I wonder."

Whereat Mrs. Bruce relinquished thoughts of the tea-towel. It would
never do, she told herself, to assist Betty and leave poor Cyril
unaided. "And I _couldn't_ clean knives," she said.

But she ran indoors to her bedroom, whence came an angry crying voice.
Six-year-old Nancy was, in the frequent intervals that occurred in the
doing of her hair, frolicking about the small hot bedroom and trying
frantically to catch the interest of the thumb-and-cot-disgusted baby.

"Do your hair nicely," said Mrs. Bruce to her second youngest daughter.
"I will take baby into the garden. Button your shoes and ask Betty to
see that your ears are clean. And your nails. A little lady always has
nice nails."

She carried her baby away, kissing her neck and cheeks and hands, and
telling her, as she had told them all, from Dorothy downwards, that
there never had been such a baby in the world before.

And she slipped her into the much used hammock under the old apple tree,
and left her to play with her toes and fingers, whilst she went back to
her violets and roses singing--

"Rock-a-bye, Baby on a tree top,
There you are put, there you must stop."

and trying to be rid of that uncomfortable feeling, of having done what
she wanted and not what she ought.

In the study Mr. Bruce sat before a paper-strewn table. Most of the
papers related to his beloved book--which was almost half-completed. It
had reached that stage several times before, and what had been written
thereafter had been consigned to the kitchen fire.

Now it was necessary that he should put it away, even out of thought,
and turn his attention towards something that would bring in a quick
return. For Dot's school fees would be due very shortly, and he
remembered, with a smile-lit sigh, that this quarter she had taken up
two extras, singing and dancing.

His income would not admit of extras--and yet, as Mrs. Bruce frequently
put it, Dot was the eldest and was very pretty. She certainly must be
able to dance and sing!

He gathered up a few stray leaves of his manuscript, rolled them up with
the bulk, and heroically put them away.

But, as he returned to his seat, he caught a glimpse of his wife,
kneeling on the path, and making a little trench with a trowel in the
bed outside his window.

"Well, little mother!" he called, and felt blithe as he said it, an