James Rowland left his wife in London with a certain satisfaction which was very unlike the great affection he had for her, and the delight which day by day he had learned more and more to take in her society. He was a man full of intelligence and quickness of mind notwithstanding various roughnesses of manner; and he never had known before what it was to have such a companion; a woman who understood almost all he meant, and meant a good deal which he was delightfully learning to understand: bringing illustrations to their life which his imperfect education had kept from him, and making him aware of a hundred new sources of satisfaction and pleasure. But his very admiration for Evelyn had deepened in his mind the first stab of anxiety which her hand had involuntarily given. He had never got over the shock of finding out that his children, instead of being the little things he had invariably gone on thinking them to be, had reached the age of early manhood and womanhood, and that he knew nothing whatever about them. He had tried at first to laugh at this as a simple evidence of his own folly, but the little puncture of that first wound had gone on deepening and deepening. He felt it only in occasional thrills at first, when it had given him about as much annoyance as a stray pang of rheumatism; but as he travelled home, every day’s nearer approach made the ache a little keener. It was the only thing in his experience of which he had said nothing to Evelyn--although from the day of their arrival in London it had begun to gnaw him like the proverbial fox under his mantle. He grew restless, unable to settle to anything, continually wondering what they would be like, how they would receive him, if they would be a credit to him or the reverse, how Evelyn would receive them, and how they would take to Evelyn. Their stiff little letters about his marriage, which were almost the first letters of theirs which he had read with any attention, had been received at Suez on the way home. And they had redoubled his anxiety and his restlessness. He did not show them to Evelyn, which was very significant of their unsatisfactory character to himself. Had they been “nice” letters, he would have been too anxious to place them in her hands, to see her face light up with interest. But they were not, alas, nice letters. They were very stiff formal productions. They acknowledged that their father had a right to please himself, and that they had no claim to be taken into consideration. “What we expected was different, but it is you, as aunt Jane says, that are the master, and we hope that your lady will not look down upon us, or keep us away from you.” This was not the sort of thing which he could show to Evelyn, anxious as she was to do everything a mother could do for his children. And all this made him very restless: he wanted to escape from her, to go and inspect them before she saw them, to try even, if that were possible, to lick them into shape before they came