myself down a selfish brute by the confession I am going
to make. But all the same, the thing is true and had better be owned up
to, all the more in the light of what afterwards happened. I had no
great wish that Louis should join our little party, which with the
advent of little Master Red Knuckles, had been rendered quite complete.
It was, I admit, an unworthy jealousy. But I thought that as Irma had
always been so passionately devoted to Louis--and also because she had,
as I sometimes teased myself by imagining, only come to me because she
had lost Louis--his coming back would--_might_, I had the grace to say
on second thoughts, deprive me of some part of my hard-earned
heritage--the love of the woman who was all to me. For with me, his
unworthy father, even Duncan Maitland had not yet begun to count. With
a man that comes later.

This is my confession, and once made, let us pass on. I had even then
the grace to be ashamed--at least, rather.

Louis arrived. He had grown into a tall lad with long hair of
straw-coloured gold, that shone with irregular reflections like muffled
moonlight on a still but gently rippling sea. He was quieter, and seemed
somehow different. He was now all for his books and solitude, and sat
long in the room that had been given him for a bedroom and study--that
with the window looking out on the wood. It was the quietest in the
house--not only because of our youthful bull of Bashan and his roaring,
but because it was at the farthest end of the long rambling house, away
from the stables and cattle sheds.

However, he seemed delighted to see Irma, and sat a long time with her
hand in his. But I, who knew her well, noticed that there was not now on
her face the old strained attention to all that her brother said or did.
It was in another direction that her ears and thoughts were turned, and
at the first cry from baby's cot she rose quietly, disengaging her hand
without remark before disappearing into the bedroom-nursery. In another
moment I could see my grandmother pass the window drying her hands on
her apron. I knew from the ceasing of the plunging thud of the dasher
that she had called a substitute to the churning. The dasher was now in
the hands of Aunt Jen, who handled it with a shorter, more irrascible
stroke.

Left alone with him, I talked to Louis a while of his studies, of the
games the boys played at school, of the length of the holidays. But to
all these openings and questionings h