In the chicken-yard the hens scuttled about, picking up chaff and bits of grain out of the dust. Over in the corner of Richard More’s yard stood the great oak-tree spreading its branches wide; and in the lot at the rear the stolid, unkempt man lifted his shovel and thrust it into the ground and threw out a handful of earth.... As Richard went up the path, he glanced at the house—The blinds of the upper window to the east were being drawn carefully together.... She was lying there in the shaded room. She would be sleeping now.... And suddenly he saw her in the blue coat, as if she lay wrapped in its folds—in her slumber. He had a sense of loss—that he had not given it to her.... Perhaps he should never be able to give it to her now. He glanced at the oak-tree, standing majestic in the lot across the lawn with its great gnarled roots protruding from the ground. And as he went up the path he had a sudden blind sense, almost of anger, at the oak-tree and its strength. X The thing that surprised Richard most was the ease and efficiency with which Eleanor handled Annabel—she seemed to know by instinct things that Richard could not understand—and that he could not understand how she came by. If she reached out her hands to take Annabel, her fingers seemed, of themselves, to curve into the places where they would fit into the spineless bundle and give it support. If Richard tried to take up the bundle, his fingers fell away like the legs of the brittle crab and the bundle collapsed, incalculable and helpless. “How do you do it?” he would say. And he would right Annabel and try to still her protests. And Eleanor would only smile gently, and send him on some masculine errand while she soothed Annabel’s feelings in the proper way. Richard had once watched a cat with her kittens and he had a vivid sense of the kinship of method—so had kittens always been brought into the world and tended; so they would always be—likewise babies. It was not something that could be read in a book or taught in a school.... Eleanor grew very beautiful these days. The little upward twist left her mouth; and if it grew almost too knowing in its sense of the boundless and accumulated wisdom of ages as regards babies—that, Richard decided, was Annabel’s fault.... Really, to know how to manage a little handful like Annabel might make any one proud. For one thing, Annabel knew exactly what she wanted.... And she usually got it. She was often disciplined on the way to it, and thwarted—but in the end she got what she wanted. As Richard More watched Annabel’s progress through life, he thought more than once of the regal gesture with which Annabel’s mother had thrown back the Chinese coat and cast it aside for Annabel’s sake....