Norman the growing realisation that his child
was a woman. A tiny woman, it is true, and requiring more care and
protection and devotion than a bigger one; but still a woman. The pretty
little ways, the eager caresses, the graspings and holdings of the
childish hands, the little roguish smiles and pantings and flirtings were
all but repetitions in little of the dalliance of long ago. The father,
after all, reads in the same book in which the lover found his knowledge.

At first there was through all his love for his child a certain
resentment of her sex. His old hope of a son had been rooted too deeply
to give way easily. But when the conviction came, and with it the habit
of its acknowledgment, there came also a certain resignation, which is
the halting-place for satisfaction. But he never, not then nor
afterwards, quite lost the old belief that Stephen was indeed a son.
Could there ever have been a doubt, the remembrance of his wife's eyes
and of her faint voice, of her hope and her faith, as she placed her baby
in his arms would have refused it a resting-place. This belief tinged
all his after-life and moulded his policy with regard to his girl's
upbringing. If she was to be indeed his son as well as his daughter, she
must from the first be accustomed to boyish as well as to girlish ways.
This, in that she was an only child, was not a difficult matter to
accomplish. Had she had brothers and sisters, matters of her sex would
soon have found their own level.

There was one person who objected strongly to any deviation from the
conventional rule of a girl's education. This was Miss Laetitia Rowly,
who took after a time, in so far as such a place could be taken, that of
the child's mother. Laetitia Rowly was a young aunt of Squire Rowly of
Norwood; the younger sister of his father and some sixteen years his own
senior. When the old Squire's second wife had died, Laetitia, then a
conceded spinster of thirty-six, had taken possession of the young
Margaret. When Margaret had married Squire Norman, Miss Rowly was well
satisfied; for she had known Stephen Norman all her life. Though she
could have wished a younger bridegroom for her darling, she knew it would
be hard to get a better man or one of more suitable station in life. Also
she knew that Margaret loved him, and the woman who had never found the
happiness of mutual love in her own life found a pleasure in the romance
of true love, even when the wooer was