hours, that the mess was caused by the fight best of all
worth fighting--of democracy against autocracy, of a man's right to do
as he likes with his life if he harms not others; of 'the Land' against
the fetterers of 'the Land.' And he was artist enough to see how from
that little starting episode the whole business had sprung--given, of
course, the entrance of the wilful force called love. But a father,
especially when he has been thoroughly alarmed, gives the artist and
philosopher in him short shrift.

Nedda came home soon after Sheila went, and to the eyes of Felix she
came back too old and thoughtful altogether. How different a girl from
the Nedda who had so wanted 'to know everything' that first night of
May! What was she brooding over, what planning, in that dark, round,
pretty head? At what resolve were those clear eyes so swiftly raised
to look? What was going on within, when her breast heaved so, without
seeming cause, and the color rushed up in her cheeks at a word, as
though she had been so far away that the effort of recall was alone
enough to set all her veins throbbing. And yet Felix could devise no
means of attack on her infatuation. For a man cannot cultivate the habit
of never interfering and then suddenly throw it over; least of all when
the person to be interfered with is his pet and only daughter.

Flora, not of course in the swim of those happenings at Joyflelds,
could not be got to take the matter very seriously. In fact--beyond
what concerned Felix himself and poetry--the matter that she did take
seriously had yet to be discovered. Hers was one of those semi-detached
natures particularly found in Hampstead. When exhorted to help tackle
the question, she could only suggest that Felix should take them all
abroad when he had finished 'The Last of the Laborers.' A tour, for
instance, in Norway and Sweden, where none of them had ever been, and
perhaps down through Finland into Russia.

Feeling like one who squirts on a burning haystack with a garden
syringe, Felix propounded this scheme to his little daughter. She
received it with a start, a silence, a sort of quivering all over, as
of an animal who scents danger. She wanted to know when, and being
told--'not before the middle of August', relapsed into her preoccupation
as if nothing had been said. Felix noted on the hall table one afternoon
a letter in her handwriting, addressed to a Worcester newspaper, and
remarked thereafter that she began to re