re of Arabella's information, nor
vouchsafing a single word of opinion on the boy's paternity, nor on
whether, had he known all this, his conduct towards her would have
been quite the same.

In the down-train that was timed to reach Aldbrickham station about
ten o'clock the next evening, a small, pale child's face could
be seen in the gloom of a third-class carriage. He had large,
frightened eyes, and wore a white woollen cravat, over which a
key was suspended round his neck by a piece of common string: the
key attracting attention by its occasional shine in the lamplight.
In the band of his hat his half-ticket was stuck. His eyes
remained mostly fixed on the back of the seat opposite, and never
turned to the window even when a station was reached and called.
On the other seat were two or three passengers, one of them a working
woman who held a basket on her lap, in which was a tabby kitten.
The woman opened the cover now and then, whereupon the kitten would
put out its head, and indulge in playful antics. At these the
fellow-passengers laughed, except the solitary boy bearing the key
and ticket, who, regarding the kitten with his saucer eyes, seemed
mutely to say: "All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly
looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun."

Occasionally at a stoppage the guard would look into the compartment
and say to the boy, "All right, my man. Your box is safe in the
van." The boy would say, "Yes," without animation, would try to
smile, and fail.

He was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that
his real self showed through crevices. A ground-swell from ancient
years of night seemed now and then to lift the child in this his
morning-life, when his face took a back view over some great Atlantic
of Time, and appeared not to care about what it saw.

When the other travellers closed their eyes, which they did one by
one--even the kitten curling itself up in the basket, weary of its
too circumscribed play--the boy remained just as before. He then
seemed to be doubly awake, like an enslaved and dwarfed divinity,
sitting passive and regarding his companions as if he saw their whole
rounded lives rather than their immediate figures.

This was Arabella's boy. With her usual carelessness she had
postponed writing to Jude about him till the eve of his landing,
when she could absolutely postpone no longer, though she had known
for weeks of his approaching arrival, and