_Done growing!_ And Wally was not yet three years old. Henry Hindes would groan within himself, and say that it was impossible. He could not be kept so long in suspense. He must know at once. He almost felt sometimes as if he would rather his boy had been killed outright, than condemned to such a lingering illness as this promised to be. He could not bear it! He could not! He could not! During those days of mortification and miserable impatience, how more than vividly Jenny Crampton’s fair image returned to his memory to torture him. His wife had advised him to confess all his unhallowed desires and wishes regarding her, but even Hannah knew little of what he had hoped, in his maddest moments, regarding Jenny. She had been a flirt--no doubt of that, though her errant heart had been caught fast at last by Frederick Walcheren. But before those days, when Henry Hindes had had no reason to affront her by the expression of his jealousy, she had not disdained to flirt a little with him on her own account. She had meant her expressions of regard for him as nothing but a flash of coquetry; but he, with his secret passion for the beautiful girl, and the mad dreams he sometimes indulged in concerning her, had chosen to translate her kindness in a far warmer manner than she intended he should. And these tender moments, which were seared upon his memory, came back with irritating persistency to him now that they were over for ever--that even the remembrance of them had been dispelled by the terrible knowledge that his hand had quenched them for ever! One day that he had brought her a little souvenir for her birthday--merely an _étui_ of velvet, filled with scissors and thimble, and the rest of the rubbish provided for the work of ladies who _don’t_ work, mounted in gold, and encrusted with turquoises--Jenny had kissed him--had advanced her ripe, pouting lips of her own accord, and pressed them upon his. He could recall to this day how the piece of coquetry affected him. She had guessed, well enough, her power over this apparently staid, sensible man of business, and liked to show it. She had smiled on him the while in her saucy way and made his head swim. It was this circumstance, and one or two others like it, that had caused Jenny to turn against him and say hard things about him directly she had gained a lover whose heart she wished to keep. It was the remembrance of such things that had made her fear the expression of his jealousy, and declare he took an unwarrantable interest in her affairs.