For a few days life was a confused tangle; then to prevent themselves going mad, each assiduously tried to pick out the beginning of a new thread to follow. Dot was up at the house, she had the little sitting-room and bedroom of her girlhood again, and she had sent to Sydney for a parcel of new music. Strange wisdom came to the little anxious mother. That it was really a serious quarrel this time she could not help acknowledging, and at first could hardly restrain herself from flying down to the cottage and upbraiding Larrie vigorously. But then again she knew her child had been to blame as well, and felt that interference just at the present stage of things would work harm. A little time apart she told herself, would do them both good, so she remained strictly neutral, and though her heart ached sometimes at the sight of Dot's unhappy eyes and carefully smiling lips, she made no obvious attempt to bring about a reconciliation. She did not even throw cold water upon Dot's wild plans that embraced an instantaneous sale of the house and a voyage to Italy. Dot had all the trunks and portmanteaus in the house carried into her bedroom, and began to pack her own and her mother's favourite possessions into them. 'This might be useful on board,' she would say, putting in a huge workbasket or writing desk, or 'You would miss this, even in Italy,' taking down an old print of the Madonna and Child that had hung in her mother's bedroom as long as she could remember. The family solicitor was visited. Dot was to come in to about £3000 by the terms of her father's will when she was twenty-one. She arranged for a sufficient advance of it to take her mother and herself to Italy. 'You will like to go, of course,' she said to her mother, 'you are losing your spirits staying in this wretched place year after year. Travel is just what you need, isn't it now, small woman?' The mother acquiesced; she would like the voyage very much, but she could not be ready quite as soon as Dot wished. She must have six weeks at least to settle about the house and different business matters. Dot chafed at the delay, she had wanted to take passages in a boat that went the very next week, and to leave any arrangements to the solicitor, but the mother for once held her own. The cottage was to be let, but until a tenant was found, Larrie was compelled to stay there with the baby and Peggie who had thrown in her fortunes with the child, and regarded her master and mistress as being for the time of unsound mind. She treated Larrie with cold severity, and no words could express the scorn she felt for the absent Dot. But on the baby, she lavished all the tenderness of her nature, and told it half-a-dozen times a day that it was a poor deserted lamb, and if she was the law she would handcuff 'them two' so fast together they could not move apart the rest of their lives.