Henry was a fine, robust child, with rosy cheeks and a sturdy, thick-set body.  He had large blue eyes and a happy, pleasant smile, but, although he was six years of age, he could hardly talk at all, and liked to spend the days twirling pieces of string round and round or looking into the fire.  His eyes were unlike the eyes of other children, and in their blue depths there lurked strange apprehensions, strange anticipations, strange remembrances.  He had never, from the day of his birth, been known to cry.  When he was frightened or distressed the colour would pass slowly from his cheeks, and strange little gasping breaths would come from him; his body would stiffen and his hands clench.  If he was angry the colour in his face would darken and his eyes half close, and it was then that he did, indeed, seem in the possession of some disastrous thraldom—­but he was angry very seldom, and only with certain people; for the most part he was a happy child, “as quiet as a mouse.”  He was unusual, too, in that he was a very cleanly child, and loved to be washed, and took the greatest care of his clothes.  He was very affectionate, fond of almost every one, and passionately devoted to his mother.

Mrs. Slater was a woman with very little imagination.  She never speculated on “how different things would be if they were different,” nor did she sigh after riches, nor possessions, nor any of the goods Fate bestows upon her favourites.  She would, most certainly, have been less fond of Henry had he been more like other children, and his dependence upon her gave her something of the feeling that very rich ladies have for very small dogs.  She was too, in a way, proud.  “Never been able to talk, nor never will, they tell me, the lamb,” she would assure her friends, “but as gentle and as quiet!”

She would sit, sometimes, in the evening before the fire and think of the old noisy, tiresome days when Henry, Senior, would beat her black and blue, and would feel that her life had indeed fallen into pleasant places.

There was nothing whatever in the house, all silent about her and filled with shrouded furniture, that could alarm her.  “Ghosts!” she would cry.  “You show me one, that’s all.  I’ll give you ghosts!”

Her digestion was excellent, her sleep undisturbed by conscience or creditors.  She was a happy woman.

Henry loved March Square.  There was a window in an upstairs passage from behind whose glass he could gaze at the passing world.  The Passing World!... the shrouded house behind him.  One was as alive, as bustling, as demonstrative to him as the other, but between the two there was, for him, no communication.  His attitude to the Square and the people in it was that he knew more about them than anyone else did; his attitude to the House, that he knew nothing at all compared with what “They” knew.  In the Square he could see through the lot of them, so superficial were they all; in the House he could only wait, with fingers on lip, for the next revelation that they might vouchsafe to him.