One day, however, when Bertram Aurelius had reached the adorable age of ten months, the unexpected happened. Little Miss Luce travelled from London in the same carriage with Ruth Seer, and getting into conversation, told her the story of Gladys and Bertram Aurelius Bone. At the moment Ruth was meditating the possibility of getting a girl to help Miss McCox without permanently destroying the peace of Thorpe Farm. Gladys Bone seemed the possibility. Never having lived, save for her brief three months’ companionship, in a well-regulated family, the accompanying baby did not strike her as an impossibility, but rather as a solution. Then and there on arriving at Fairbridge did Miss Luce carry her off to see them both. Bertram Aurelius had eyes the colour of a delphinium, a head of red down, and a skin like strawberries and cream. He had little hands that held you tight and pink toes which he curled and uncurled. He crowed at Ruth and promptly put her finger in his mouth. “Ain’t he beautiful?” said his small mother. “She is really an excellent worker,” said little Miss Luce, when Gladys and Bertram Aurelius had been dismissed. “And she will do anything for anyone who is good to the baby. If you think you _could_ manage with him, possibly——?” She looked at Ruth anxiously. Ruth laughed. “My dear lady,” she said, “I have just discovered that the one thing wanted to make Thorpe perfect is a baby.” “But you have other servants,” suggested Miss Luce. “I fear you may find them a difficulty.” Certainly Miss McCox’s attitude towards the situation was more than doubtful, but Ruth had learnt that a distinctly soft kernel existed somewhere under the hard shell of an unattractive personality. She thought of Bertram Aurelius’s blue eyes and soft red head. “I think you must send Gladys out to Thorpe to apply for the situation _with_ Bertram Aurelius,” she said. They looked at each other, and Miss Luce nodded comprehensively. “He is a very attractive baby,” she murmured. It was the next morning, while Ruth was revelling in the arrival of delicious fluffy yellow things in her fifty-egg incubator, that Miss McCox emerged from the house, evidently the bearer of news of importance. As always, she was spotlessly clean and almost unbearably neat, and her clothes appeared to be uncomfortably tight. Her collar was fastened by a huge amber brooch, her waist-belt by a still larger glittering metal buckle, both presents from the young man to whom she had been engaged in her distant youth, and who had died of what Miss McCox described as a declining consumption. Out of the corner of Ruth’s eye she looked distinctly uncompromising. “There’s a young woman come to apply for the situation,” she announced. “Does she seem likely to be any good?” asked Ruth, still busy with the incubator. “She’s got a baby,” said Miss McCox, who always came to the point. “And she wants to keep it.” “A baby?”