He had £250 a year, and no guardians or parents to give him unasked advice. So he resolved to take a year's holiday according to his doctor's orders, before he started his profession, and teach and train Dot till she was an ideal wife. He had all kinds of ideas on the subject, though he was so very boyish to look at, and he intended to inculcate Dot with them all. But for the first year he was so exuberantly happy he forgot all about them. It was only when the baby was growing into months, and Dot was continually forgetting some article of its clothing, or the kicking exercise that was to make it an athlete, or when her piano made her forget its existence for a little while, that he began to think he was not doing his duty by her, and must turn over a new leaf. CHAPTER III DOT AND LARRIE FALL OUT 'And though she is but little, she is fierce.' The cottage was a delightful place. It was built of weatherboard, not the kind that overlaps, but that with a groove between each board. The verandah was very wide and ran round the four sides; that was Larrie's great extravagance when he improved the place. 'Where's a fellow to smoke when it's hot or wet if there isn't a decent verandah?' he said. He and Dot had walked miles upon it in the early months of the year, he with his pipe in his lips and a look of great content in his eyes, she with her hands linked at the back of her neck or slipped around his arm. There was a profusion of hammocks and lounges and chairs that made you lazy to look at them. That was Dot's extravagance. On one side the outer wall was of yellow and white roses that flowered eternally, on another, wistaria with delicate down-dropping blooms. The third--the kitchen side--was passion-vines, and the fourth was clear, and showed a grand sweep of country, and all the Sydney vista. There was a narrow hall and a painted front door, on either side of it long French windows opening, one into the dining-room, the other into Dot's beautiful little drawing-room. She had spent a week thinking out the furnishing of that room, and nearly all her mother's wedding-present cheque upon it. 'No, I won't have a carpet,' she said when her mother was dwelling upon the advantages of Brussels over Wilton pile, 'and no, I won't have felt, it's too stuffy looking; and if you buy me a proper tapestry suite I shall set fire to it. In India people furnish sensibly, but in Australia, which must be nearly as hot, they do everything in English style.' The little mother ceased her suggestions, and Dot worked her own will with really charming effect.