t was only on these rare
occasions that he was ever kissed or caressed, and she talked to his shy
boyishness until it felt a more spirited variety of manhood. "What have
you been doing?" she asked, "since I saw you last."

She never said he had grown, but she told him he looked tall; and though
the tea was a marvellous display it was never an obtrusive tea, it
wasn't poked at a fellow; a various plenty flowed well within reach of
one's arm, like an agreeable accompaniment to their conversation.

"What have you done? All sorts of brave things? Do you swim now? I can
swim. Oh! I can swim half a mile. Some day we will swim races together.
Why not? And you ride?...

"The horse bolted--and you stuck on? Did you squeak? I stick on, but I
HAVE to squeak. But you--of course, No! you mustn't. I'm just a little
woman. And I ride big horses...."

And for the end she had invented a characteristic little ceremony.

She would stand up in front of him and put her hands on his shoulders
and look into his face.

"Clean eyes?" she would say, "--still?"

Then she would take his ears in her little firm hands and kiss very
methodically his eyes and his forehead and his cheeks and at last his
lips. Her own eyes would suddenly brim bright with tears.

"GO," she would say.

That was the end.

It seemed to Benham as though he was being let down out of a sunlit
fairyland to this grey world again.

3

The contrast between Lady Marayne's pretty amenities and the good
woman at Seagate who urged herself almost hourly to forget that William
Porphyry was not her own son, was entirely unfair. The second Mrs.
Benham's conscientious spirit and a certain handsome ability about her
fitted her far more than her predecessor for the onerous duties of a
schoolmaster's wife, but whatever natural buoyancy she possessed was
outweighed by an irrepressible conviction derived from an episcopal
grandparent that the remarriage of divorced persons is sinful, and by a
secret but well-founded doubt whether her husband loved her with a truly
romantic passion. She might perhaps have borne either of these troubles
singly, but the two crushed her spirit.

Her temperament was not one that goes out to meet happiness. She had
reluctant affections and suspected rather than welcomed the facility
of other people's. Her susceptibility to disagreeable impressions was
however very ample, and life was fenced about with protections for her
"feelings." It filled y