lean-shaved.

"Where have you two sprung from?" he inquired, admitting them into the
hall.

Mr. Stone gave him no answer, but passed into the drawing-room, and sat
down on the verge of the first chair he came across, leaning forward
with his hands between his knees.

Stephen, after one dry glance at him, turned to his daughter.

"My child," he said softly, "what have you brought the old boy here for?
If there happens to be anything of the high mammalian order for dinner,
your mother will have a fit."

Thyme answered: "Don't chaff, Father!"

Stephen, who was very fond of her, saw that for some reason she was not
herself. He examined her with unwonted gravity. Thyme turned away from
him. He heard, to his alarm, a little gulping sound.

"My dear!" he said.

Conscious of her sentimental weakness, Thyme made a violent effort.

"I've seen a baby dead," she cried in a quick, hard voice; and, without
another word, she ran upstairs.

In Stephen there was a horror of emotion 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