Little Beatrice gave promise of great beauty.

She had the Earle face, Ronald said.

Lillian was a fair, sweet babe, too gentle, her mother thought, to live.

Neither of them resembled her, and at times Dora wished it had been otherwise.
Perhaps in all Ronald Earle's troubled life he never spent a more unsettled or wretched year than this.

"It is impossible to paint," he said to himself, "when disturbed by crying babies." So the greater part of his time was spent away from home.