“What, kick at a lady!” cried Sir Charles, giving the child a shake. “But we are not used to all these punctilios. We shall do very well, I don’t fear.” “It is very bad for the child--indeed, he ought to be asleep,” Katherine could not but say. She felt herself the maiden aunt, as Stella had called her, the robust middle-aged woman--a superannuated care-taking creature who did nothing but interfere. “Oh, we’ll look after that, Job and I,” the father said, going on down the stairs without even the fictitious courtesy of waiting till Katherine should pass. She stood and watched them going towards the drawing-room, the father and child. The devotion between them was a pretty sight--no doubt it was a pretty sight. The group of the mother and child is the one group in the world which calls forth human sentiment everywhere; and yet the father and child is more moving, more pathetic still, to most, certainly to all feminine, eyes. It seems to imply more--a want in the infant life to which its mother is not first, a void in the man’s. Is it that they seem to cling to each other for want of better? But that would be derogatory to the father’s office. At all events it is so. Katherine’s heart melted at this sight. The poor little child uncared for in the midst of so much ease, awake with his big excited eyes when he ought to have been asleep, exposed to the cold to which he was unaccustomed, shivering yet not complaining, his father carrying him away to comfort his own heart--negligent, but not intentionally so, of the child’s welfare, holding him as his dearest thing in the world. The ayah, on hearing the sound of voices, came to the door of the room, expostulating largely in her unknown tongue, gesticulating, appealing to the unknown lady. “He catch death--cold,” she cried, and Katherine shook her head as she stood watching them, the child recovering his spirits in the warmth of the shawl, his little laugh sounding through the house. Oh, how bad it was for little Job! and yet the conjunction was so touching that it went to her heart. She hesitated for a moment. What would be the use of following them, of endeavouring through Sir Charles’ cigar and Job’s chatter to give her brother-in-law the needful information, joyful though it must be. She did not understand these strange, eager, insouciant, money-grasping, yet apparently indifferent people, who were satisfied with her curt intimation of their restoration to wealth, even though they were forever, as Lady Jane said, agape for more. She stood for a moment hesitating, and then she turned away in the other direction to her own room, and gave it over for the night.