Ishmael never again during that visit felt quite the easy intimacy with Judy that he had touched that day by the stream, though as the next few years went on and her visits became a regular thing to look forward to there was built up between them a fabric of friendship that grew to be something unique to both.  Those things which had happened to Judy had taught her every tolerance and sympathy.

They were not on the whole bad, those years that followed.  Nicky, after writing more or less regularly, suddenly announced his intention of coming home again, and Ishmael was filled with a joy that no personal thing had had power to wake in him since the boy had gone.  The thought of Nicky had seldom been far from him; always it was with the idea of Nicky in the forefront of his mind that he worked for Cloom.  When he had first taken on the idea of Cloom as the central scheme of his life it had been for Cloom itself, or rather for the building up of an ideal Cloom which his father’s conduct had shattered.  Now he realised that if he had had no son to inherit after him his work would not have held the same deep significance for him, even though it was not with any conscious idea of a son that he had started on his task.  Now, since Nicky’s departure, he had begun to see how incomplete the whole scheme would have been without him, how incomplete it would still be if Nicky wanted to wander all his days, or if modernity and the new country over the sea should have come to mean more to him than the old.  He knew by Nicky’s letter that this was not so, and his heart sang within him.  For days after the letter came a glamour that to his eyes the world had lost illuminated it once again.

The ’nineties, young and go-ahead as they felt to themselves, did not seem to Ishmael nearly as wonderful as the ’seventies, which had seen so much deeper changes.  This world—­in which people now moved so complacently talking of Ibsen and Wilde, of weird Yellow Books of which he heard from Judith, and many other things all designated as fin-de-siecle—­he had seen it in the making.  The very children growing up in his house, the plump little Ruth and the clever, impatient Lissa, they thought they knew so much more than he did because they had been born so much later; and so in a way they did, in as much as the younger generation always sees more truly because it has not had time to collect so many prejudices, but can come straight and fresh to setting right the problems of the world.  But what Lissa and Ruth did not yet realise as he did was that the day would come when children born in the new century would look upon them with a gentle pity.

On the day the letter came from Nicky, nearly two years after he had gone away, Ishmael went over to see Boase and tell him the news.  The Parson could not often get over to Cloom Manor now, but it was the highest tribute to him that not only Ishmael and Judy and Georgie, when she could spare the time, but the children too, considered a visit to the Parson in the light of a pleasure.  Boase knew it and was glad—­even his sturdy aloofness and self-reliance would have felt a pang at being called on for decency’s sake.