But had she felt secure it would have pleased her. The old house was too formal, too heavy with the fragrances and lingering stiffness of a past day. She could never quite grow to like the eternal quiet. A hearty clattering now and then would have relieved her pent-up vitality. She would have liked, just once in a long, long while to listen to one of Tom Meadowburn’s stories, or hear Bennet shouting in the back yard. VIII But Mrs. Blaydon grew neither better nor worse and they remained at Trezevant Place. And when Moira was a year and a half old a fresh sorrow visited her mother. So rapid and unforeseen were the steps by which it came that Ellen scarcely realized what was happening. To her, indeed, the child seemed to acquire new marvels of goodness and beauty every day, but she imagined it was only her mother’s pride that made her think so. She was not the sort who would boast of the deeds of her offspring. Then she grew aware that others shared her interest. More and more, in particular, she found the child, when she came to look for her, in the company of Aunt Mathilda, even in that lady’s arms, most happily at home and warmly welcome. “It is going to be very improving for Moira,” was her thought, and she realized with a pang that she had been reading Hugo’s book for more than a year now, and was not yet halfway through it. Mrs. Seymour’s brother was among those who noticed her partiality for the baby. “Look,” she said to him one day, with enthusiasm, holding out one of the child’s tiny pink hands, “how remarkably made they are. She’s the same all over. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a perfect baby.” Blaydon laughed, thereby eliciting a brilliant response in kind from Moira. The vibrations of his big voice had tickled her young flesh. “Well, Mathilda, the broadest road to your heart is still a pair of hands. I remember your telling me that poor old Ned first got you with his.” “Hands and feet,” she replied. “I don’t mind anything else but they ought to be beautiful.” A few days afterward he came upon her in the garden, again with Ellen’s daughter. “Que voulez-vous,” she was saying, “que voulez-vous, ma p’tite? Voulez-vous maman?” The soft syllables seemed to please Moira’s ears, for she was mirthfully bubbling things that sounded not unlike them. As Blaydon stepped out he thought his sister a little apologetic, but she did not put down the child. “The little thing wandered out here while I was reading,” she said. “She quite seems to follow me about.” “You don’t find it annoying?” he asked. Her reply served notice upon him that she had caught his note of irony. “Oh, no.... I’m not such a busy woman as all that.” He glanced at the book she had been reading. It lay flung face downward with both backs spread out on the table, “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard.” Blaydon recalled the story and somehow connected it in his mind with his sister’s essential solitude--her dependence upon his own family for affection.