most unwillingly suffered himself to
be turned round to meet his father's eyes. He gave one glance up at the
face, which he did not now feel was worn with study and care--which
now that he saw it near was full of lines and wrinkles which meant
something else, and which even the emotion in it, emotion of a kind
which Pippo did not understand, hidden by a laugh, did not make more
prepossessing--and then he stood with his eyes cast down, not caring to
see it again.

The elder Philip Compton had, I think, though he was, as he said, an
unlikely subject for that mood, tears in his eyes--and he had no
inclination to see anything that was painful in the face of his son,
whose look he had never read, whose voice he had never heard, till now.
He held the boy with his hands on his shoulders, with a grasp more full
perhaps of the tender strain of love (though he did not know him) than
ever he had laid upon any human form before. The boy's looks were not
only satisfactory to him, but filled his own heart with an unaccustomed
spring of pride and delight--his stature, his complexion, his features,
making up as it were the most wonderful compliment, the utmost sweetness
of flattery that he had ever known. For the boy was himself over again,
not like his mother, like the unworthy father whom he had never seen.
It took him some time to master the sudden rush of this emotion which
almost overwhelmed him: and then he drew the boy's arm through his own
and led him back to where the two ladies sat, Elinor still too much
agitated for speech. "I said I'd present my son to you, Nell--if you
wouldn't present him to me," he said, with a break in his voice which
sounded like a chuckle to that son's angry ears. "I don't know what you
call the fellow--but he's big enough to have a name of his own, and he's
Lomond from this day."

Pippo did not know what was meant by those words: but he drew his arm
from his father's and went and stood behind Elinor's chair, forgetting
in a moment all grievances against her, taking her side with an energy
impossible to put into words, clinging to his mother as he had done when
he was a little child.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

It was while this conversation was going on that John Tatham, anxious
and troubled about many things, knocked at the door in Ebury Street.
He was anxious to know how the explanations had got accomplished, how
the boy took it, how Elinor had borne the strain upon her of such a
revelation. Wel