heart about his mother's departure than any other healthy, happy
child under like circumstances. Indeed, it may be doubted whether a
healthy, happy child, unknowing whence its beatitudes spring, does not
in its deepest, most vital moment regard all grown-up people as
necessary nuisances. No one came so delightfully near being another
child as Mildred; but Tims was a capital playfellow too, a broad
comedian of the kind appreciated on the nursery boards.

A rousing game with him and an evening at the theatre with Mr. Fitzalan,
distracted Tims's thoughts from her anxieties. But at night she dreamed
repeatedly and uneasily of Milly and Mildred as of two separate persons,
and of Mr. Goring, whose vivid face seen in the full light of the window
at Hampton Court, returned to her in sleep with a distinctness
unobtainable in her waking memory.

On the following day her work with Sir James Carus was of absorbing
interest, and she came home tired and preoccupied with it. Yet her
dreams of the night before recurred in forms at once more confused and
more poignant. At two o'clock in the morning she awoke, crying aloud: "I
must get Milly back"; and her pillow was wet with tears. For the two
following hours she must have been awake, because she heard all the
quarters strike from a neighboring church-tower, yet they appeared like
a prolonged nightmare. The emotional impression of some forgotten dream
remained, and she passed them in an agony of grief for she knew not
what, of remorse for having on a certain summer afternoon denied Milly's
petition for her assistance, and of intense volition, resembling prayer,
for Milly's return.

CHAPTER XXXI

The intense heat of early afternoon quivered on the steep woods which
fell to the river opposite the house. The sunlit stream curved under
them, moving clear and quiet over depths of brown, tangled
water-growths, and along its fringe of gray and green reeds and grasses
and creamy plumes of meadow-sweet. The house was not very large. It was
square and white; an old wistaria, an old Gloire-de-Dijon, and a newer
carmine cluster-rose contended for possession of its surface. Striped
awnings were down over all the lower windows and some of the upper. A
large lawn, close-shorn and velvety green, as only Thames-side lawns can
be, stretched from the house to the river. It had no flower-beds on it,
but a cedar here, an ilex there, dark and substantial on their own dark
shadows, and trellises a