‘No. I think he’s feverish. He got a fright, waking up alone. He’s very nervous.’ He bent over the child, rocking him, patting his shoulder. ‘I expect he’s just playing up. You ought to put him back in his cot.’ ‘No. He’d cry. I couldn’t _endure_ it if he cried any more. I’ll keep him till he’s asleep.’ Solemn in his shawl, Peter bent his too-brilliant gaze upon her as she stooped to touch his cheek. He never smiled for her; but then neither did he greet her as he greeted most people with a clear: “Go ‘way.” He accepted her with grave politeness. ‘Do you like holding him?’ ‘Yes,’ he said simply. He was holding the child to comfort himself. ‘He’s very nice,’ she said. ‘What a different sort of childhood he’ll have from yours, with the others always round you! He’s likely to be the eldest of the next generation by a good deal, isn’t he?’ ‘I should say so,’ he said bitterly. ‘I don’t mind betting not one of us provides a little cousin for him. I don’t see us breeding somehow. Unless possibly Martin....’ Not Roddy. No.... ‘Well, you mustn’t let him be lonely.’ ‘That’s her affair.’ ‘Is it? She seems to let you take charge. Julian, does she love him?’ He was silent for a moment before answering: ‘I think she does.’ He put his hand to his head and said suddenly, very low: ‘O God, it’s awful! You know I quarreled with him--Charlie--over that marriage. I never saw him after it--we were never reconciled. But after the child was born, she wrote and told me he had said in his last letter to her that if anything happened to him he would like me to be the child’s guardian.... So I suppose he forgave me.’ ‘Of course, of course, Julian,’ she said, half-weeping at the look of his bowed head. Was this the canker that gnawed Julian,--interminable thought of Charlie dead like that, without a reconciling word? ‘I blame only myself,’ he said, still in the low voice. ‘_She_ has been very good. Never a word of--anything. Always that sweet empty unresentful way,--like a child. Sometimes I think she never knew--or never understood, anyway. I think she can’t understand that sort of thing. It’s a sort of insensitiveness. She might hate me over Peter, but she doesn’t seem to. Why doesn’t she?’ The expression she had surprised on Mariella’s face came back to her, still undecipherable.