Inside the brooch was a cluster of little heads, gaudily painted, six in all; Dot, the seventh, had been born after it was done.

[p 18]
]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 [p 19] ]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.

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 [p 20] ]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.

[p 21]
]CHAPTER III
DOT AND LARRIE FALL OUT

‘And though she is but little, she is fierce.’