Gran’papa’s room was the pleasantest in the house—small, square and cosy. The furniture was of some yellowish wood, glassy with polish, and there was a chequered crimson tablecloth and, summer and winter, a dancing yellow fire. The window was always open, and the fresh warmed air smelt faintly of biscuits and tobacco and old bindings. The pictures on the walls hung orderly, in couples, Landseer engravings and framed coloured casts of trout; for Gran’papa was a fisherman. He was a fiddler too, though here zeal outran discretion. His violin was wrapped away in silk and velvet, like a lady, and Laura was never quite sure that it was not, say—first cousin? to the fairy fiddle in _Grimm’s_. She longed to experiment. There was the big desk with ink and seals and wax, and neat papers innumerable, and a pot with marigolds or mignonette, and always there was sunshine and the bad-tempered canary, that would dash at you from its open cage, with peckings and shrill squeaks of jealous rage, till Gran’papa whistled, when it would perch upon his finger or his skull-cap, and slowly condense from a passionate puff-ball into an elegant little gentleman in lemon yellow breeches and snuff-coloured swallow-tails, with an eye so fixed and bright that you could swear it wore a monocle. A memory to bring a lump into a grandchild’s throat, the picture of stern old Gran’papa, with his whole edifice of dignity built up so solidly, from his square-toed boots and speckless broadcloth and his grey satin tie with its pearl pin, to his curly beard and cold blue eyes, and the unnecessary skull-cap upon his splendid white head, fantastically topped by a scolding bull-canary. A grown-up Laura, looking back, a long way back, might begin, belatedly, to miss a half-forgotten Gran’papa, might wonder whether, after all, she had sufficiently appreciated him, realize with a sigh that she had learned in those young years to love him as sincerely and coldly and faithfully as he had loved her; though ‘love’ was not a word that Laura could imagine Gran’papa using, any more than she could hear him saying, ‘pretty girl’ when he meant, he emphatically meant, ‘an elegant young female.’ Even ‘young woman’ would have been a concession for Gran’papa’s nice ear. Just so, Laura’s phrase would have been tempered by Gran’papa to ‘affection,’ ‘esteem,’ ‘respect.’ And there she would have agreed with him again, for she certainly respected him profoundly. And he, secretly, respected her, because in her he could recognize his own keen, fastidious spirit. Emotionally, they were at opposite poles, but intellectually they were allies with kindred tastes and kindred minds. Not kindred souls—there they parted company; for where Laura’s affection could invariably be trusted to blind her to the most obvious flaws, the testing tool of her grandfather’s hypercritical taste had left him, at the end of a long life, with no object worth loving at all—save Laura.