It rolled a little way, and pointing it out to Brandon with her long wooden knitting-pin, she said, in a soft quiet tone, “Love, will you pick it up?” and Valentine, who had overheard the little speech, was inexpressibly hurt, almost indignant.  He could not possibly have told why, but he hoped she did not say that often, and when Brandon gave it into her hand again, and said something to her that Valentine could not hear, he felt almost as if he had been unkindly used, as if his feelings had been insulted, and he vowed that it should be a long time before he came to see them again.

“It won’t do,” he thought to himself.  “I see this means a great deal more than I ever thought it did.  I thought Giles would be jealous, and I should have to set things in a light that would satisfy him; but it is I who am jealous, and he does not care what I feel at all.  She is all I could wish; but I don’t know whether looking at her is most bitter or most sweet.”

As for John, he had walked down to the wood as usual, in full possession of his present self, and as he supposed of his future intentions, and yet, sitting opposite to these married lovers for a quarter of an hour, wrought a certain change in him that nothing ever effaced.  It was an alien feeling to him to be overcome by a yearning discontent.  Something never yet fed and satisfied made its presence known to him.  It was not that sense which comes to all, sooner or later, that human life cannot give us what we expected of it, but rather a passionate waking to the certainty that he never even for one day had possessed what it might have given.  He had never been endowed for one day with any deep love, with its keen perceptions and high companionship.

“Well, I suppose I didn’t deserve it,” he thought, half angrily, while he tried to trample the feeling down and stifle it.  But his keener instincts soon rose up in him and let him know that he did deserve it.  It was very extraordinary that he had not won it—­there were few men, indeed, who deserved it half so well.

“But it’s too late now,” he chose to say to himself, as he drove home.  “It’s not in my line either to go philandering after any woman.  Besides, I hate red hair.  The next Dissolution I’ll stand for the borough of Wigfield.  Seven children to bring up, and one of them almost as big as myself—­what a fool I am!  What can I have been thinking of?”

“What are you laughing at, papa?” said Barbara, who was sitting beside him.

“Not at you, my darling,” he replied; “for you are something real.”

For the next few weeks neither he nor Valentine saw much of Dorothea:  excepting at three or four dinners, they scarcely met at all.  After this came the Harrow holidays.  Johnny came home, and with him the inevitable Crayshaw.  The latter was only to stay a week, and that week should have been spent with Brandon, but the boys had begged hard to be together, having developed a peculiar friendship for one another which seemed to have been founded on many fights, in consequence of which they had been strictly forbidden to meet.