"It must have been so even when you were a child," she went on. "I heard you tell Janey once that when you were her age you belonged to no one. I don't like to think of that. It touches the maternal side of me. It makes me think of Jack. Suppose Jack belonged to no one; and you were not so old as Jack. I wonder if you were at all like him, and how you looked. I wish there was a picture of you I could see." He had never regarded himself as an object likely to interest in any degree, and had lost many of the consolations and excitements of the more personal kind thereby; and to find that she had even given a sympathetic thought to the far-away childhood whose desolateness he himself had never quite analyzed, at once touched and bewildered him. "I have not been without friends," he said, "but I am sure no one ever gave much special thought to me. Perhaps it is because men are scarcely likely to give such thoughts to men, and I have not known women. My parents died before I was a year old, and I don't think any one was ever particularly fond of me. People did not dislike me, but they passed me over. I never wondered at it, but I saw it. I knew there was something a little wrong with me; but I could not understand what it was. I know now: I was silent, and could not express what I thought and felt." "Oh!" she cried; "and was there no one to help you?" There was no thought of him as a full-grown person in the exclamation; it was a womanish outcry for the child, whose desolate childhood seemed for the moment to be an existence which had never ended. "I know about children," she said, "and what suffering there is for them if they are left alone. They can say so little, and we can say so much. Haven't I seen them try to explain things when they were at a disadvantage and overpowered by the sheer strength of some full-grown creature? Haven't I seen them make their impotent little struggle for words and fail, and look up with their helpless eyes and see the uselessness of it, and break down into their poor little shrieks of wrath and grief? The happiest of them go through it sometimes, and those who are left alone--Why didn't some woman see and understand?--some woman ought to have seen and cared for you." Tredennis found himself absorbed in contemplation of her. He was not sure that there were not tears in her eyes, and yet he could hardly believe it possible. "That is all true," he said; "you understand it better than I did. I understood the feeling no better than I understood the reason for it." "I understand it because I have children," she answered. "And because I have watched them and loved them, and would give my heart's blood for them. To have children makes one like a tiger, at times. The passion one can feel through the wrongs of a child is something _awful_. One can feel it for any child--for all children. But for one's own"--