On Thursdays and Saturdays the mother used to come down to the cottage and put it straight, and help poor Peggie, and bring a new knitted jacket or bootees or a hood or pinafore for baby. The house was a big lonely place for such a little woman. She was even smaller than Dot. She had a tiny fragile figure, and a tiny face, brown and shrivelled with Australian suns. Her eyes were very big and pathetic, something like Dot's in wistful moments, and her mouth with its infinitude of lines, was very sweet. After her eyes, her brooch was the first thing that invited notice. It was one of those large, very old-fashioned ones with a miniature set on the front of it. Dot had begged her to cease wearing it; 'It isn't good taste,' she had said once vexedly, 'keep it in a drawer;' but the mother would not lay it aside even though it was the only thing in which she had ever thwarted Dot in her life. When she went to bed she pinned it on her night-gown, when she dressed in the morning she fastened her collar with it. A hundred times a day her fingers strayed to it. In her sleep her hand stole up and closed upon it. The miniature was of a very young man in the old fashioned naval uniform that used to be worn forty years ago. He had the correct miniature smile, but the eyes were well done and you could see his brow had been splendid. He was Dot's father, dead sixteen years ago; it was the only likeness he had ever had taken. Inside the brooch was a cluster of little heads, gaudily painted, six in all; Dot, the seventh, had been born after it was done. Four of the heads pressed clay pillows in a churchyard not very far away, seas washed over the fifth, and the sixth lay in a lonely grave in the wilds of Western Australia. Dot was the only one alive, and now she had flown from the home-nest to one of her own, leaving unutterable desolation behind her in the mother's heart. It was because death had so broken and bruised this little frail mother that she had never crossed Dot's will in anything since she was born. The days of insistence and control, and obedience-seeking were buried with the buried six. Dot ruled, and the mother poured out her heart at her feet and worshipped with a love almost desperate. So when Dot said she was going to be married at once, albeit only seventeen years had passed over her little sunny head, the mother had not been able to refuse. She had only reminded Larrie, whom she loved dearly and had known for years, how young her darling was, and on her knees she had prayed him to be good to her always. Larrie was twenty-two. For sixteen years he had come up to the house in the holidays at the first sign of a ripening orange; he had eaten bananas with Dot, one of them at each end of the fruit, when she was two. He had played cricket with her at six, climbed trees with her at ten, pulled her hair and pinched her for being a girl at twelve, forgotten her for a time at fifteen, and come back and married her at seventeen.