She trotted round the open door, carefully closing it with her body, her steady eyes taking in the disposition of affairs. In a moment she stood near the table, the silky rounded golden crown of her head rising just above it. Miriam thrilled at her nearness, delighting in the firm clutch of the tiny hand on the edge of the table, the gentle shapely bulge of the ends of her hair inturned towards her neck, the little busy bustling expression of her bunchy motionless little muslin dress. Suddenly she looked up in her way, Gerald’s disarming gentleness, all Eve’s reined-in gaiety ... “I your baby?” she asked with a small lunge of affection. Miriam blushed. The tiny thing had _remembered_ from yesterday ...... Yes, she murmured encircling her and pressing her lips to the warm silken top of her head. Gerald burst into loud wailing. Elspeth moved backwards towards Harriett and stood propped against her, contemplating him with sunny interest. Harriett’s firm ringed hand covered the side of her head. “Poor Poppa” she suggested. “Be _cri_-ut Gerald!” Elspeth cried serenely, frowning with effort. She stood on tip-toe surveying the contents of the table and waved a peremptory hand towards the gramophone. Gerald tried to make a bargain. Lifted on to Harriett’s knee she bunched her hands and sat compact. The direct rays made her head a little sunlit sphere, smoothly outlined with silky pale gold hair bulging softly over each ear, the broken curve continued by the gentle bulge of her cheeks as she pursed her face to meet the sunlight. She peered unsmiling, but every curve smiled; a little sunny face, sunlit. Fearing that she would move, Miriam tried to centre attention by seeming engrossed in Gerald’s operations, glancing sideways meanwhile in an entrancement of effort to define her small perfection. The list of single items summoned images of children who missed her charm by some accentuation of character, pointing backwards to the emphatic qualities of a relative and forward so clearly that already they seemed adult. Elspeth predicted nothing. The closest observation revealed no point of arrest. Her undivided impression once caught, could be recovered in each separate feature. Eve came in as the music ceased. In the lull that followed the general greetings Miriam imagined a repetition of the song, to carry Eve back into what had gone before and forward with them in the unchanged morning. But Mrs. Thimm broke in with a tray and scattered them all towards the fire. Let’s hear Molly Darling once more she thought in a casual tone. After yesterday Eve would take that as a lack of interest in her presence. Supposing she did? She was so changed that she could be treated without consideration, as an equal ...... but she overdid it, preening herself, caring more for the idea of independence than for the fact. That would not keep her going. She would not be strong enough to sustain her independence ......