I had been on the point of calling the child Lady Pym, and she was his daughter! Fool that I had been! “Because they simper and attitudinise,” said Sir Roderick. “If they behaved as sensibly as men I should like them as well.” “That’s not saying very much,” said Lilia, with an amused look at me. “Papa is not enamoured of his fellow-men.” “Do you want me to be hail-fellow well-met with Tom, Dick, and Harry?” he said, frowning at the daughter who was so unlike him that I began to think more charitably of my mistake. “You know I don’t. I like you just as you are!” said his daughter, looking adorable with an infantine smile of love and trust brightening her sweet face. It was like a personal sunshine. I felt it so, later, when she deigned to shine upon me; and every time it humbled me, and made me feel coarse, clumsy, unworthy, a very clod; and now it, or the memory of it, comes back here—it shines suddenly upon a poor sufferer’s face upon the pillow, and the patient vanishes and I see Lilia. This won’t do. I must return to my statement. After luncheon, Sir Roderick sent me out into the grounds with his daughter. From first to last he purposely threw us together. What his motive was I cannot imagine. Motive he has: I have seen enough to know that he never acts without one. Lilia told me so much as we wandered, first about the Italian garden just outside the dining-room windows, then across the lawns into the pinewoods. It was so difficult to check her childish confidences, which she poured out as a little creature just finding the use of its tongue will babble as it trots along holding one’s hand. They treated me, all of them, at the Pinewood, except one, of whom more presently, with simple trust; even Nero, the old mastiff, slouched along at our heels with his big tongue out, panting, as if I were an old friend. I must never, even in thought, betray that trust. I must never forget that to aspire would be a breach of that sacred confidence—never, never! On this subject I pray, as the octogenarian said in Dickens’ _Haunted Man_, “Lord, keep my memory green!” She talked of her father—well and good. “Papa has no patience with frivolity,” she said. “He only has sympathy with people who do their duty. That is what every one ought to feel, is it not? Ah! I thought you would say ‘Yes.’ Of course, it is much nicer when you like doing your duty, isn’t it? Those old men who come here and beetle-hunt and botanise, or go poring over the books in the library, not only like what they have to do in life, they love it. I do envy them.” “But you—you like your life, do you not?” I asked. Just then we came to a clearing in the wood. A giant pine, lately felled, lay prone among the ferns and mosses. She stopped. “Let us sit down a moment,” she said; “you take my breath away.”