will I
permit Matilda to have anything to do with the rearing of my children
excellent creature though she be!"

On the other hand, he would not have been unwilling for Mary to mother
them. This, of course, was out of the question: Richard had accustomed
himself to Trotty, but would thank you, she knew, for any fresh
encroachment on his privacy. Before leaving, however, she promised to
sound him on the plan of placing Trotty as a weekly boarder at a Young
Ladies' Seminary, and taking the infant in her place. For it came out
that John intended to set Zara--Zara, but newly returned from a second
voyage to England and still sipping like a bee at the sweets of various
situations--at the head of his house once more. And Mary could not
imagine Zara rearing a baby.

Equally hard was it to understand John not having learnt wisdom from
his two previous failures to live with his sister. But, in seeking
tactfully to revive his memory, she ran up against such an ingrained
belief in the superiority of his own kith and kin that she was baffled,
and could only fold her hands and hope for the best.

"Besides, Jane's children are infinitely more tractable than poor
Emma's," was John's parting shot.--Strange, thought Mary, how attached
John was to his second family.

He had still another request to make of her. The reports he received of
the boy Johnny, now a pupil at the Geelong Grammar School, grew worse
from term to term. It had become clear to him that he was unfortunate
enough to possess an out-and-out dullard for a son. Regretfully giving
up, therefore, the design he had cherished of educating Johnny for the
law, he had resolved to waste no more good money on the boy, but to
take him, once he was turned fifteen, into his own business. Young
John, however, had proved refractory, expressing a violent antipathy to
the idea of office-life. "It is here that I should be glad of another
opinion--and I turn to you, Mary, my dear. Jane was of no use whatever
in such matters, none whatever, being, and very properly so, entirely
wrapped up in her own children." So Mary arranged to break her homeward
journey at Geelong, for the purpose of seeing and summing up her nephew.

Johnny--he was Jack at school, but that, of course, his tomfools of
relations couldn't be expected to remember--Johnny was waiting on the
platform when the train steamed in. "Oh, what a bonny boy!" said Mary
to herself. "All poor Emma's good looks."

Johnny had been k