The child gazed at it with ravishment, put out a weird hand, touched it, stroked it, and then, as he looked back at Wharton, the most exquisite smile dawned in his saucer-blue eyes.

“What? did you like it, grasshopper?” cried Wharton, enchanted by the beauty of the look, his own colour mounting.  “Then you shall have another.”

And he twisted and turned his piece of fresh paper, till there, beside the first, stood a second fairy animal—­a greyhound this time, with arching neck and sharp long nose.

“There’s two on ’em at Westall’s!” cried the child, hoarsely, clutching at his treasures in an ecstasy.

Mrs. Hurd, at the other end of the cottage, started as she heard the name.  Marcella noticed it; and with her eager sympathetic look began at once to talk of Hurd and the works at the Court.  She understood they were doing grand things, and that the work would last all the winter.  Minta answered hurriedly and with a curious choice of phrases.  “Oh! he didn’t have nothing to say against it.”  Mr. Brown, the steward, seemed satisfied.  All that she said was somehow irrelevant; and, to Marcella’s annoyance, plaintive as usual.  Wharton, with the boy inside his arm, turned his head an instant to listen.

Marcella, having thought of repeating, without names, some of Mrs. Jellison’s gossip, then shrank from it.  He had promised her, she thought to herself with a proud delicacy; and she was not going to treat the word of a working man as different from anybody else’s.

So she fastened her cloak again, which she had thrown open in the stifling air of the cottage, and turned both to call her companion and give a smile or two to the sick boy.

But, as she did so, she stood amazed at the spectacle of Wharton and the child.  Then, moving up to them, she perceived the menagerie—­for it had grown to one—­on Wharton’s knee.

“You didn’t guess I had such tricks,” he said, smiling.

“But they are so good—­so artistic!” She took up a little galloping horse he had just fashioned and wondered at it.

“A great-aunt taught me—­she was a genius—­I follow her at a long distance.  Will you let me go, young man?  You may keep all of them.”

But the child, with a sudden contraction of the brow, flung a tiny stick-like arm round his neck, pressing hard, and looking at him.  There was a red spot in each wasted cheek, and his eyes were wide and happy.  Wharton returned the look with one of quiet scrutiny—­the scrutiny of the doctor or the philosopher.  On Marcella’s quick sense the contrast of the two heads impressed itself—­the delicate youth of Wharton’s with its clustering curls—­the sunken contours and the helpless suffering of the other.  Then Wharton kissed the little fellow, put his animals carefully on to a chair beside him, and set him down.