“Your affectionate husband

“JOHN SHOLTO BANNERMAN.”

Before she was quite finished, Juley’s voice broke, and she wiped her eyes with simple ostentation.

“Thank God, children, for such a father as you have!” she exclaimed. Then finding that Sholto had added a post-script to his letter – “Since writing this,” she read out, “my cold has become worse, and seems now to be on my chest (not chest of drawers, tell Linnet!), but Mrs. Ross here is a kind body and a great poulticer, so I expect, D.V., to throw it off shortly.”

“If Father died, would we have a cablegram by the line laid by the Great Eastern?” asked Linnet with unusual animation.

“Linnet! How can you!” cried Georgie. Whereupon Linnet subsided. But his imagination had been captured by the idea of the cable, and he had been thinking of it while his mother was reading. Two months ago they had all gone to Liverpool to see their father off, and the children had been taken over the Great Eastern which lay there as a show ship before being broken up. Linnet had been impressed by the story of how the cable had been laid under the sea; and now he half hoped that his father would die, so that he should be able to see with his own eyes what a cablegram looked like. He wondered if it got much nibbled by fishes on its way.

It was, after all, a united little party that was driven an hour later to Aunt Georgina’s imposing front door in Moray Place; the more so because certain humiliation awaited them there. Unpunctuality was a weakness with which Mrs. Balmain had no sympathy; and from their cousin Mabel, who alone had met them at the station, they knew that their telegram had not arrived in time to prevent inconvenience. Mabel with Irene, Aunt Georgina’s only daughter, had already started in the carriage to meet the missed express, whereat Irene had been greatly annoyed. She and the carriage were now paying calls, so that the Bannermans must be content with a common cab. Mabel, who was a Bannerman, not a Balmain, and was not an inmate of the Moray Place household, was sympathetic, as always, in a misfortune. But neither Georgie nor Joanna failed to notice the sly grin which their orphaned cousin could never wholly restrain when the family from Glasgow got into trouble with their Edinburgh relations.