She had taken the paper and thanked him, and settling herself opposite him in her grandmother’s chair, had sat quietly reading the aching headlines. And in the silence that followed she had felt, through all her urgent anxiety, how the icy crust under which the quiet river of their mutual affection had always flowed imprisoned, was melting at last. They made no demonstration. It was not in his nature, even in its strength, and now he was old, enfeebled; while she had been so drilled by the necessities of her life with Justin that she wore repression, like a dress, laced over her natural impulsiveness; nevertheless they had eased each other. For the first time in her life she was not on her best behaviour with him: her little ways, the occasional mannerisms, he passed over in silence, or perhaps, because she was at her entire ease, they occurred no longer. She nursed him, in as far as he would allow it, in her busy aunt’s stead; for his cold ran no normal course: a spell of sunshine did not brisken him: he coughed and faded. After a paroxysm—it was distressing to see him—he would lie exhausted in his chair, and sometimes wander a little or, rather, break into speech that was but drifting and idle thought. And Laura, listening, half guiltily, as one eavesdropping, marvelled how little she knew, and yet she had thought she knew, Gran’papa. He talked to her, of his schooldays, of his youth, of mild adventures before he married. But they all led in the end, she noticed, to Grandmamma, whom she remembered vaguely as a sweet voice and a smile, in a pale-brown camel’s-hair shawl. He would speak of her, watching Laura’s face and her beautiful, busy hands. “You don’t remember your grandmamma, of course?” “You are very like your grandmamma.” “You are very like my wife.” And once he called her “Anne.” Yet another side to Gran’papa! Laura, as she dusted the drawing-room, would find herself pausing thoughtfully, wasting long minutes, before the faded crayon on the bamboo easel. The youthful, slim-waisted man, with the ringlets and Roman nose and serious eyes, who reminded her of _David Copperfield_ and the Duke of Wellington, was, not nominally but really, Gran’papa: that was the strange part of it. Gran’papa, behind his shell of white hair, and trembling hands, and hectorings, and fidgetiness, was—not a habit, not an institution—but a man.... There was a closer tie between them than the accident of kinship: they were knit by the common experience of their common humanity.... He was a man and she was a woman.... He knew—incredible that Gran’papa should know—all that she knew.... He had loved ‘Anne,’ who was her little old dead grandmother.... She remembered hints of Aunt Adela—scraps of stories about a courtship that had not been all plain sailing.... He, Gran’papa upstairs, knew then what pain meant—knew as well as Laura the sickness of uncertainty ... the unnerving hopes and fears ... knew how like a stone one’s heart could lie in one’s breast.