once; she was four years old; and he took little Archie, the two-
year-old, on his knee, as if to guard him from some moral or social
contagion. Then Bertram remembered how he had seen African mothers
beat or pinch their children till they made them cry, to avert the
evil omen, when he praised them to their faces; and he recollected,
too, that most fetichistic races believe in Nemesis--that is to
say, in jealous gods, who, if they see you love a child too much,
or admire it too greatly, will take it from you or do it some
grievous bodily harm, such as blinding it or maiming it, in order
to pay you out for thinking yourself too fortunate. He did not
doubt, therefore, but that in Scotland, which he knew by report to
be a country exceptionally given over to terrible superstitions,
the people still thought their sanguinary Calvinistic deity,
fashioned by a race of stern John Knoxes in their own image, would
do some harm to an over-praised child, "to wean them from it." He
was glad to see, however, that Frida at least did not share this
degrading and hateful belief, handed down from the most fiendish of
savage conceptions. On the contrary, she seemed delighted that
Bertram should pat little Maimie on the head, and praise her sunny
smile and her lovely hair "just like her mother's."

To Philip, this was all a rather serious matter. He felt he was
responsible for having introduced the mysterious Alien, however
unwillingly, into the bosom of Robert Monteith's family. Now,
Philip was not rich, and Frida was supposed to have "made a good
match of it"--that is to say, she had married a man a great deal
wealthier than her own upbringing. So Philip, after his kind,
thought much of the Monteith connection. He lived in lodgings at
Brackenhurst, at a highly inconvenient distance from town, so as to
be near their house, and catch whatever rays of reflected glory