Ishmael watched him as Vassie skilfully dipped and dried him, turning him about on her lap to dust the powder into the interstices of his tiny person, and, far from resenting this as an indignity, he seemed to think it all a huge joke.  Yet the jollity of him, his sudden smiles and his clutchings and wavings, all seemed addressed to himself alone—­part of some life he alone knew, some vision he alone could see.  As he was soaped and patted, and powdered and turned, there was always the air about him of a being really supremely independent of everyone; although his body seemed so helpless one got the impression that his soul was thoroughly aloof, untouched.  When he laughed at the efforts of the grown-ups to please him it was a sublime condescension, that was all.  When something failed to please him he was recalled to the things of this world and set up a loud wail, which filled Ishmael with anxiety, though Vassie and the nurse remained unaccountably calm.  The baby evidently was of their opinion, because he left off wailing with the suddenness with which he had begun, and finally was tucked into his cradle and fell soundly asleep, one tiny hand flung palm upwards upon the pillow by his head after the manner of babies from time immemorial.

Ishmael, though he had first held aloof and then been terrified when Vassie insisted on his taking the fragile little body in his arms, had yet felt a thrill go through him when he did so.  It was not possible for a man to have the feeling for the land that he had and not both crave for a child and feel a deep-rooted emotion at its possession.  Yet it was more than that, he told himself, when he felt the warm little body utterly dependent on him.  He had taken him up before often enough, but never in the intimacy of this evening, which held the quality of a shrine.

He showed nothing of what he felt, but that evening, after Vassie and her ever-talking husband had settled themselves in the parlour, he went up again to the nursery and told the nurse she could go downstairs for a little while.  Then he crossed over to the cot and, drawing back the curtain, looked down at the little morsel lying asleep in it.  This was his son, this small rosy thing, his son that would one day walk his land beside him and would eventually take it over as his own.  This was flesh of his flesh as no wife could ever be, and soul of his soul as well.

As he looked the baby began to whimper and opened its eyes, of the milky blue of a kitten’s.  Ishmael went on his knees beside the cot, and eager, absurdly eager, to be able to cope with the situation successfully himself, spoke as soothingly as he knew how.  The baby’s whimper became a cry.  His little hand beat the air.  Ishmael struck his forefinger into the tiny palm, and the little fingers curled round it with that amazing tenacity of babies, who can clutch and suck before they can do anything else—­getting, always getting, from life, like all young things.  The baby hung firmly on