“No, no, my little boy. Your father has not been hurt. Come, we’ll go down and find him,” Katherine said. When they were nearly at the foot of the stairs, during which time he had clung to her with a little hot grip, half piteous half painful, there suddenly sprung up in the dark hall below, at the lighting of the lamp, a gleam of bright light, and Sir Charles became visible at the foot of the stairs, coming towards them. The child gave a shriek of joy and whirled himself from the top of some half-dozen steps into his father’s arms. “You’re not eated up,” he said; “fader, fader! Job fader’s boy.” “Has he been cross?” said Sir Charles. He held the little creature in his arms lovingly, with a smile that irradiated his own heavy countenance like a gleam of sunshine. “I hates her,” cried Job. “I kicked her. She dot nothing to do with me.” “Job, Job,” said the father gently, “you shouldn’t be so cross and so hasty to a kind lady who only wanted to bring you to father. If you behave like that she will never be kind to you again.” “I don’t tare. I hates ze lady,” Job said. His father lifted his eyes and shrugged his shoulders apologetically to Katherine, and then laughed and carried his little son away. Decidedly, whatever Katherine was to make a success in, it was not in the _rôle_ of maiden aunt. Next day, to the distress and trouble of Katherine, early in the afternoon there came a visitor whose appearance made Stella turn towards her sister with an open-eyed look of malice and half ridicule. No; Lady Somers did not intend it so. It was a look of significance, “I told you so,” and call upon Katherine’s attention. The visitor was James Stanford, their fellow-passenger by the _Aurungzebe_. He explained very elaborately that Sir Charles had given him an invitation, and that, finding himself on business of his own in the Isle of Wight, he had taken advantage of it. He was not a man who could quickly make himself at his ease. He seemed oppressed with a consciousness that he ought not to be there, that he wanted some special permission, as if it had been with some special purpose that he had come. “Oh, you need not apologise,” said Stella; “if you had not come then you might have apologised. We expect everybody to come to see us. Fancy, we’ve seen scarcely anyone for a week almost, except some old friends who have lectured us and told us what was our duty. Do you like to be told what is your duty, Mr. Stanford? I don’t; if I were ever so much inclined to do it before, I should set myself against it then. That is exactly how narrow country people do; they turn you against everything. They tell you this and that as if you did not know it before, and make you turn your back on the very thing you wanted to do.” “I don’t think,” said Stanford, “that I could be turned like that from anything I wanted to do.”