And at once it was clear he did not really mean it. He did not care. He was used to people adoring him, wanting from him what he never gave but always charmingly pretended to give. It was a deep pang in the heart. She cried out inwardly: ‘Ah, you don’t mean it!...’ Yet at the same time there was the melting glow because he had after all said it. Another time he took a pin out of his coat and said: ‘D’you see what this is?’ ‘A pin.’ ‘Guess where I found it.’ ‘In the seat of your chair.’ The flippancy was misplaced. He ignored it and said impressively: ‘In my pudding at school.’ ‘Oh!’ ‘I nearly swallowed it.’ ‘_Oh!_’ ‘If I had I’d ‘a’ died.’ He stared at her. ‘Oh, _Charlie_!...’ ‘You can keep it if you like.’ He was so beautiful, so gracious, so munificent that words failed.... She put the pin in a sealed envelope and wrote on it. “The pin that nearly killed C.F.” with the date; and laid it away in the washstand drawer with her will and a bit of uncut turquoise, and some shells, and a piece of bark from the poplar tree that fell down in the garden. After that she was a good deal encouraged to hope he might marry her. Sometimes Charlie and Mariella looked alike--clear, bloodlessly cool; and they both adored dogs and talked a special language to them. But Charlie was all nerve, vulnerable, easy to trouble; and Mariella seemed quite impervious. They disliked each other. He thought she despised him, and it made him nag and try to score off her. Yet they had this subtle likeness. Sometimes Charlie played the piano for hours. He and Julian remembered tunes in their heads and could play them correctly even if they had only heard them whistled once. If one could not remember a bar, the other could: they supplemented each other. It was thrilling to hear them. They were wrapped in shining mists of glory. When Charlie sang Christmas carols his voice was heart-breakingly sweet and he looked like the little choir boy, too saintly, too blue-eyed to live,--which made Judith anxious. The grandmother used to wipe her eyes when he sang, and say to Judith, just as if she had been grown up, that he was the image of his dear father. The grandmother did not love Julian in the same way, though sometimes in the evening she would stroke his rough stormy-looking head as he lay on the floor, and say very pityingly: ‘Poor old boy.’ He used to shut his eyes tight when she said it, and let himself be stroked for a minute, then jerk away. He always did things twice as vehemently as other people. He never shut his eyes without screwing them up. At first you thought he was just beastly, but later you found he was pathetic as well and knew why she said: ‘Poor old boy’ with that particular inflection. Later still you varied hating him with almost loving him.