Halloway bent and kissed Olly’s flushed face.  “Do you hear, my boy?  It is all right now, and there is Maggie calling you to swing her.  Don’t forget you promised to make me a visit at the rectory to-morrow.”

Olly threw his arms around Denham’s knees and gave him a convulsive hug.  “I like you though you are a minister,” he said, through his tears.  “I just wish you were my sister!” And then he went slowly off to Maggie, and Denham and Gerald stood silently where he had left them.  Gerald was the first to speak.

“You think I am hard on Olly.  I see it in your face.”

“I do think,” replied Denham, slowly, with a faint smile curving his well-cut lips, “that perhaps it might be happier for Olly if you would try to consider him less in the light of a boy, and more as—­as only a little animal.  You are so tender-hearted and pitiful toward animals.”

Gerald flushed angrily.  “I like plain speaking best.  You think I am hard on him.  Why don’t you say so?”

“I will if you prefer it.  I do think so.”

“Thanks.  Is there any thing else you would like to say to me in your capacity as clergyman before we join the others?”

“Yes, if I may really venture so far.  Your hat is quite crooked.”

Gerald straightened it without a smile.  “Thanks again.  Anything else?”

“Absolutely nothing.”  He turned to escort her back, but Gerald stood still, frowning out at the lake.

“You don’t know Olly,” she said, curtly.

“Maybe not, but I know childish nature pretty well, perhaps because I love it.”

“Ah!  I don’t love it.  It isn’t lovable to me.  It is all nonsense to call it the age of innocence.  It is vice in embryo instead of in full leaf, that is all.”

“But that is an inestimable gain of itself.  A little of a bad thing is surely much better than a great deal of it.  For my part I confess to a great partiality for children.  There is something pathetic to me in the little faults and tempers that irritate us now chiefly because they clash against our own weaknesses, and yet on the right guidance of which lies the whole making or marring of the child’s life.”

“Doesn’t guidance include punishment?”

“Yes, it includes it.  But it does not consist of it.”

Gerald still stood half turned from him, frowning out over the placid blue water.  “Ah,” she said, “it chiefly consists of good example and that sort of thing, I suppose.”

“I think it consists chiefly of love,” said Halloway, simply.

Gerald made no answer at first, then turned and looked at him almost defiantly.  Her changeable eyes seemed black as she raised them to his.  “Would you have thrown Olly’s marbles into the lake?”

“No,” replied Halloway, looking steadily back at her.

“Then you would have been very foolish,” said Gerald, haughtily.  “It was the only way to touch him.  I was quite right to do it.”