ich had happened in his life. For it is a ridiculous incident.
When a man is hardened to it, when he has had several children and is
habituated to the paternal honours, it may be amusing and interesting
and all the rest. But scarcely a year after his marriage, when he was
not quite four-and-twenty, to be the father of twins! He felt sometimes
as if it was the result of a conspiracy to make him ridiculous. The
neighbouring potentates, when he met them, laughed as they congratulated
him. "If you are going to continue like this, you will be a patriarch
before you know where you are," one of them said. It was a joke to the
entire country round about. Twins! He felt scarcely any of the stirrings
of tenderness in his heart which are supposed to move a young father,
when he looked at the two little yawning, gaping morsels of humanity. If
there had been but one, perhaps!--but two! He was the laughing-stock of
the neighbourhood, he felt. The sight of his wife, pale and smiling,
touched his heart indeed. But even this sight was not without its pangs.
For alas! she knew all about this position which was so novel to him.
She understood the babies and their wants, as it was natural a mother
who was already experienced in motherhood should. And finally she was
so far carried away by the privileges and the expansion of the moment
as to ask him--him! the last authority to be consulted on such a
subject--whether Geoff was delighted to hear of his little sisters.
Geoff's little sisters! The thought of that boy having anything to
do with them, any relationship to claim with _his_ children clouded
Warrender's face. He turned it away, and Lady Markland, in the sweet
enthusiasm of the moment, fortunately did not perceive that change. She
thought in her tender folly that this would make everything right; that
Geoff, as the brother of his little girls, would be something nearer to
Theo, claiming a more favourable consideration. She preserved this hope
for some time, notwithstanding a great many signs to the contrary. Even
Theo's dark face, when he found Geoff one day in his mother's room,
looking with great interest at the children, did not alarm the mother,
who was determined not to part with her illusion. "Do you think it right
to have a boy of Geoff's age here in your room?" he said. "Oh, Theo, my
own boy!--what harm can it do?" she had said, so foolishly, forgetting
that Geoff's crime in the eyes of his young stepfather was exactly this,
tha