There followed for Ishmael a time when the sordidness inseparable from a death in a civilised country made of everything a hideousness, and he was aware of a rising tide of irritability in himself that he found it difficult to keep within the decorous bounds of the subdued aspect required from a newly-made widower.  Later, after the funeral was over and life at the Manor had somewhat settled down again, with the incongruous addition of a nurse, he began to feel that unkind touch of the ludicrous which accompanies the position of a young man left with a baby on his hands.  He was ashamed of this feeling and tried to suppress it, but it was there nevertheless.  It ceased to twinge when Vassie came down, her husband with her, to pay him a visit—­partly because, he guessed, it was to see that all was being done for the baby’s welfare in such a masculine house that she had come.

Vassie was resplendent, and if she did not love her husband ecstatically she was intensely proud of him.  She had become an enthusiastic Radical, and talked of the rights of the people as to the manner bred.  Ishmael suppressed a smile, feeling himself completely the embodiment of opposite views, and liked her husband in spite of it.  He was just not quite a gentleman—­a little too vivid, too clever, too emphatic; but that he would go far even the Parson believed.  Ishmael was grateful to the pair for coming, and never asked Vassie why she, who held such socialistic views, had not come to stay when Phoebe was alive.

Afterwards he realised the chief debt he owed to Vassie was that she first opened his eyes to the delightfulness of his child.  One evening of winter he happened to come in earlier than usual, at the sacred hour of the bath, and Vassie promptly pounced on him and made him come up to the room she had arranged according to her modern ideas—­the modernity of ’69—­as a nursery.  A fire leapt in the grate from behind a thing like a wire meat-safe that Ishmael had never seen before and that had never been considered necessary to keep him or his brothers from a fiery death.  Before it was spread a creamy-hued blanket, on which stood an oval bath from whose lip a cloud of steam wavered up, the incense of this ritual.  Vassie sat beside it, a towel over her knees, and sprawling upon it, its bent legs kicking in the air, its tiny fists clutching at everything and nothing with the instinctive grasp of life, lay the baby.

James Nicholas Ruan—­so called after his uncle and the Parson—­was a little over three months old, just the age when a baby begins to be attractive even to a male observer.