trying to make the
best of a none too promising situation, and I'll thole through, as
Whinstane Sandy puts it. After breakfast this morning, in fact, when
Pauline Augusta was swept by one of those little gales of lonesomeness
to which children and women are so mysteriously subjected, she climbed
up into my lap and I rocked her on my shoulder as I might have rocked
a baby. Dinky-Dunk wandered in and inspected that performance with a
slightly satiric eye. So, resenting his expression, I promptly began
to sing:

"Bye-bye, Baby Bunting,
Daddy's gone a-hunting,
To gather up a pile of tin
To wrap the Baby Bunting in!"

Dinky-Dunk, when the significance of this lilted flippancy of mine
had sunk home, regarded me with a narrowed and none too friendly eye.

"Feeling a bit larkier than usual this morning, aren't you?" he
inquired with what was merely a pretense at carelessness.

It was merely a pretense, I know, because we'd been over the old
ground the night before, and the excursion hadn't added greatly to the
happiness of either of us. Duncan, in fact, had rather horrified me by
actually asking if I thought there was a chance of his borrowing
eleven thousand dollars from Peter Ketley.

"We can't all trade on that man's generosity!" I cried, without giving
much thought to the manner in which I was expressing myself.

"Oh, _that's_ the way you feel about it!" retorted my husband. And I
could see his face harden into Scotch granite. I could also see the
look of perplexity in my small son's eyes as he stood studying his
father.

"Is there anything abnormal in my feeling the way I do?" I parried,
resenting the beetling brow of the Dour Man.

"Not if you regard him as your personal and particular fairy
god-father," retorted my husband.

"I've no more reason for regarding him as that," I said as calmly as
I could, "than I have for regarding him as a professional
money-lender."

Duncan must have seen from my face that it would be dangerous to go
much further. So he merely shrugged a flippant shoulder.

"They tell me he's got more money than he knows what to do with," he
said with a heavy jocularity which couldn't quite rise.

"Then lightening his burdens is a form of charity we can scarcely
afford to indulge in," I none too graciously remarked. And I saw my
husband's face harden again.

"Well, I've got to have ready money and I've got to