Of Horace, her second son, the Lady Millicent was neither proud nor fond. He was born delicate, and his infancy being a sickly and a troublesome one, his lady mother took a disgust to the child who was associated in her mind with doctors’ visits (this great personage, being very robust herself, had no patience with illness), occasional visits to a nursery smelling of drugs, and the irritating wailing of a suffering infant. As little Horace advanced in years, everyone, with the exception of his mamma, pronounced him to be, though a plain mite of a child enough, a very engaging and intelligent specimen of humanity. He was very sweet-tempered too, and docile, “getting” his baby lessons, as the head nurse expressed herself, twice as quick as Master Vavasour. But then it must be remembered that Arthur was an elder son; and when a child is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, anything above the average amount of brains is, as all the world will allow, a superfluous possession. Two daughters, Rhoda and Katherine--of whom more hereafter--completed the family, to the care and education of which Cecil Vavasour, both from a high sense of duty and following the dictates of his own heart, greatly devoted himself. Perfectly alive to the injury done to the children by the absence on their mother’s part of either the appearance or the reality of maternal tenderness, he did all that lay in his power to remedy the evil; but with the best intentions, a man cannot in such a case, to any effectual purpose, play a woman’s part. A father’s caresses to his child lack ever the softness of a woman’s touch; and moreover Cecil Vavasour’s nature was not, as we know, a demonstrative one: his constitutional infirmity of shyness, even when alone with the children in whose well-being his own happiness was bound up, shackled and oppressed him, proving a sad hindrance to that perfect confidence between parent and child which is so valuable an element in education. But although in some respects Cecil Vavasour might fall short in his exalted aims, though the young people at the Castle might and probably did miss the invaluable advantage of which they were deprived by Lady Millicent’s natural _hardness_ of character, they were nevertheless, in one respect at least, highly favoured. On their father’s unchangeable justice they could ever and always implicitly rely, as well as on that entire absence of caprice which is one of the most precious negative gifts with which those in power, whether great or limited, can be endowed.