They prowled a little more about the hamlet, every step almost revealing some new source of poison and disease. Of their various visits, however, Langham remembered nothing afterward but a little scene in a miserable cottage, where they found a whole family partly gathered round the mid-day meal. A band of puny black-eyed children were standing or sitting at the table. The wife, confined of twins three weeks before, sat by the fire, deathly pale, a ‘bad leg’ stretched out before her on some improvised support, one baby on her lap and another dark-haired bundle asleep in a cradle beside her. There was a pathetic, pinched beauty about the whole family. Even the tiny twins were comparatively shapely; all the other children had delicate, transparent skins, large eyes, and small colorless mouths. The father, a picturesque, handsome fellow, looking as though he had gypsy blood in his veins, had opened the door to their knock. Robert, seeing the meal, would have retreated at once, in spite of the children’s shy inviting looks, but a glance past them at the mother’s face checked the word of refusal and apology on his lips, and he stepped in. In after years Langham was always apt to see him in imagination as he saw him then, standing beside the bent figure of the mother, his quick, pitiful eyes taking in the pallor and exhaustion of face and frame, his hand resting instinctively on the head of a small creature that had crept up beside him, his look all attention and softness as the woman feebly told him some of the main facts of her state. The young Rector at the moment might have stood for the modern ‘Man of Feeling,’ as sensitive, as impressionable, and as free from the burden of self, as his eighteenth-century prototype. On the way home Robert suddenly remarked to his companion, ‘Have you heard my sister-in-law play yet, Langham? What did you think of it?’ ‘Extraordinary!’ said Langham briefly. ‘The most considerable gift I ever came across in an amateur.’ His olive cheek flushed a little involuntarily. Robert threw a quick observant look at him. ‘The difficulty,’ he exclaimed, ‘is to know what to do with it!’ ‘Why do you make the difficulty? I gather she wants to study abroad. What is there to prevent it?’ Langham turned to his companion with a touch of asperity. He could not stand it that Elsmere should be so much narrowed and warped by that wife of his, and her prejudices. Why should that gifted creature be cribbed, cabined, and confined in this way? ‘I grant you,’ said Robert with a look of perplexity, ‘there is not much to prevent it.’ And he was silent a moment, thinking, on his side, very tenderly of all the antecedents and explanations of that old-world distrust of art and the artistic life so deeply rooted in his wife, even though in practice and under his influence she had made concession after concession.