He dined with his grand-parents that night as they had promised; and the old people watched him with an anxious scrutiny, of which the child was vaguely conscious. They had no insight into the tempest that was surging in his childish bosom, but watched him as wistfully as if they had been the children and he the man, wondering whether “his mother’s blood” was working in him, and any wild desire of adventure and vagrancy like hers arising in his mind, or whether he was thinking of and longing for her, which seemed the most natural supposition. I think, had they known the selfish shame and fear which had taken possession of him, both of them would have been disappointed and shocked, even though satisfied. They would have blamed the boy as without natural feeling, and they would have been wrong. The feeling in Valentine’s heart was all chaotic, undeveloped. He had found out what was the meaning of the contradiction of two natures in him, the jar of which he had been dimly conscious, without knowing what it was. The struggle itself had been going on within him for years, since the time when, a mere child, he had suffered and conquered that natural thirst for the out-of-door life to which he had been born. He had stood by his nursery window many a day and gazed out, and beaten his head and his hands against the panes, longing to escape, with a longing which was only recognised as naughtiness, and which by force of circumstances and some innate force of nature had been restrained. His ductile infantine nature had been forced into the new channel, and now he thought of the old one with a thrill and shiver of imaginative terror: but no distinct enlightenment as to his own position pierced the childish imbroglio of his thoughts. He felt rather than thought that he was in danger; he had lost his happy sense of security; but his mind had not gone further. All this, however, was as invisible, as unrevealable, to the two old people, who watched him so anxiously, as their eager watch was to him. He had not left their charge for a day for seven long years, and yet they knew as little of him as you and I, dear reader, know of the child who has never left our side, and has, as it seems, no thought, no object in life apart from ours. How can we tell what that unknown familiar creature will do when set out upon independent life for itself? and how could they tell what was passing in Val’s bosom, which had no window to it, any more than the rest of us have?