“Perhaps so!” he again yielded. “You see I’m doing pretty well here—apart from the public-house: I always think that’s Meg’s. Come and look in the stable. I’ve got a shire mare and two nags: pretty good. I went down to Melton Mowbray with Tom Mayhew, to a chap they’ve had dealings with. Tom’s all right, and he knows how to buy, but he is such a lazy careless devil, too lazy to be bothered to sell——” George was evidently interested. As we went round to the stables, Emily came out with the baby, which was dressed in a new silk frock. She advanced, smiling to me with dark eyes: “See, now he is good! Doesn’t he look pretty?” She held the baby for me to look at. I glanced at it, but I was only conscious of the near warmth of her cheek, and of the scent of her hair. “Who is he like?” I asked, looking up and finding myself full in her eyes. The question was quite irrelevant: her eyes spoke a whole clear message that made my heart throb; yet she answered. “Who is he? Why, nobody, of course! But he _will_ be like father, don’t you think?” The question drew my eyes to hers again, and again we looked each other the strange intelligence that made her flush and me breathe in as I smiled. “Ay! Blue eyes like your father’s—not like yours——” Again the wild messages in her looks. “No!” she answered very softly. “And I think he’ll be jolly, like father—they have neither of them our eyes, have they?” “No,” I answered, overcome by a sudden hot flush of tenderness. “No—not vulnerable. To have such soft, vulnerable eyes as you used makes one feel nervous and irascible. But you have clothed over the sensitiveness of yours, haven’t you?—like naked life, naked defenceless protoplasm they were, is it not so?” She laughed, and at the old painful memories she dilated in the old way, and I felt the old tremor at seeing her soul flung quivering on my pity. “And were mine like that?” asked George, who had come up. He must have perceived the bewilderment of my look as I tried to adjust myself to him. A slight shadow, a slight chagrin appeared on his face. “Yes,” I answered, “yes—but not so bad. You never gave yourself away so much—you were most cautious: but just as defenceless.” “And am I altered?” he asked, with quiet irony, as if he knew I was not interested in him. “Yes, more cautious. You keep in the shadow. But Emily has clothed herself, and can now walk among the crowd at her own gait.” It was with an effort I refrained from putting my lips to kiss her at that moment as she looked at me with womanly dignity and tenderness. Then I remembered, and said: “But you are taking me to the stable George! Come and see the horses too, Emily.” “I will. I admire them so much,” she replied, and thus we both indulged him.