“Oh, dear me, Roxbury, would you have left the poor little darling at home—­in all that dreadful heat?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t have been blamed for leaving her at home,” he protested.  “She didn’t exist until half an hour ago.  Heavens! how they do spring up!”

The remainder of Brock’s day was spent in getting acquainted with his family—­or, rather, his menage.  There were habits and foibles, demands and restrictions, that he had to adapt himself to with unvarying benignity.  He made a friend of Raggles without half trying; dogs always took to him, he admitted modestly.  Tootles was less vulnerable.  She howled consistently at each of his first half-dozen advances; his courage began to wane with shocking rapidity; his next half-hearted advances were in reality inglorious retreats.  Spurred on by the sustaining Constance, he stood by his guns and at last was gratified to see faint signs of surrender.  By midday he had conquered.  Tootles permitted him to carry her up and down the station platform (she was too young to realise the risk she ran).  Edith and Constance, with the beaming nurse and O’Brien, applauded warmly when he returned from his first promenade, bearing Tootles and proudly heeled by Raggles.  Fond mothers in the crowd of hurrying travellers found time to look upon him and smile as if to say, “What a nice man!” He could almost hear them saying it.  Which, no doubt, accounted for the intense ruddiness of his cheeks.

“Do you ever spank her?” he demanded once of Mrs. Medcroft, after Tootles had brought tears to his eyes with a potent attack upon his nose.  She caught the light of danger in his grey eyes and hastily snatched the offending Tootles from his arms.

Miss Fowler kept him constantly at work with his eyeglass and his English, neither of which he was managing well enough to please her critical estimate.  In fact, he laboured all day with the persistence, if not the sullenness, of a hard-driven slave.  He did not have time to become tired.  There was always something new to be done or learned or unlearned:  his day was full to overflowing.  He was a man of family!

The wife of his bosom was tranquillity itself.  She was enjoying herself.  When not amusing herself by watching Brock’s misfortunes, she was napping or reading or sending out for cool drinks.  With all the selfishness of a dutiful wife, she was content to shift responsibilities upon that ever convenient and useful creature—­a detached sister.

Brock sent telegrams for her from cities along the way,—­Ulm, Munich, Salzburg, and others,—­all meant for the real Roxbury in London, but sent to a fictitious being in Great Russell Street, the same having been agreed upon by at least two of the conspirators.  It mattered little that she repeated herself monotonously in regard to the state of health of herself and Tootles.  Roxbury would doubtless enjoy the protracted happiness brought on by these despatches, even though they got him out of bed or missed him altogether until they reached him in a bunch the next day.  He may also have been gratified to hear from Munich that Roxbury was perfectly lovely.  She said, in the course of her longest despatch, that she was so glad that the baby was getting to like her father more and more as the day wore on.