on amounting almost to disease. It
would have been difficult to say when he had last shown emotion; perhaps
not since Thyme was born, and even then not to anyone except himself,
having first locked the door, and then walked up and down, with his teeth
almost meeting in the mouthpiece of his favourite pipe. He was
unaccustomed, too, to witness this weakness on the part of other people.
His looks and speech unconsciously discouraged it, so that if Cecilia had
been at all that way inclined, she must long ago have been healed.
Fortunately, she never had been, having too much distrust of her own
feelings to give way to them completely. And Thyme, that healthy product
of them both, at once younger for her age, and older, than they had ever
been, with her incapacity for nonsense, her love for open air and
facts--that fresh, rising plant, so elastic and so sane--she had never
given them a single moment of uneasiness.

Stephen, close to his hat-rack, felt soreness in his heart. Such blows
as Fortune had dealt, and meant to deal him, he had borne, and he could
bear, so long as there was nothing in his own manner, or in that of
others, to show him they were blows.

Hurriedly depositing his hat, he ran to Cecilia. He still preserved the
habit of knocking on her door before he entered, though she had never, so
far, answered, "Don't come in!" because she knew his knock. The custom
gave, in fact, the measure of his idealism. What he feared, or what he
thought he feared, after nineteen years of unchecked entrance, could
never have been ascertained; but there it was, that flower of something
formal and precise, of something reticent, within his soul.

This time, for once, he did not knock, and found Cecilia hooking up her
tea-gown and looking very sweet. She glanced at him with mild surprise.

"What's this, Cis," he said, "about a baby dead? Thyme's quite upset
about it; and your dad's in the drawing-room!"

With the quick instinct that was woven into all her gentle treading,
Cecilia's thoughts flew--she could not have told why--first to the little
model, then to Mrs. Hughs.

"Dead?" she said. "Oh, poor woman!"

"What woman?" Stephen asked.

"It must be Mrs. Hughs."

The thought passed darkly through Stephen's mind: 'Those people again!
What now?' He did not express it, being neither brutal nor lacking in
good taste.

A short silence followed, then Cecilia said suddenly: "Did you say that
father was in the drawing-