He was sitting one day in the nursery with the little year-old thing on his knees, feeding her deftly from a cup of warm milk that she had pushed away when presented by her mother.  The nurse and Nanna looked kindly on the spectacle of Majendie’s success, while his wife watched him steadily without a word.  The nurse, presuming on her privileges, made an injudicious remark.

“She won’t do anything for anybody but her daddy.  I never saw such a funny little girl.”

“I never saw such a shocking little flirt,” said Majendie; “she takes after her mother.”

“She’s the living image of you, ma’am,” said Nanna, conscious of the other’s blunder.

“I wish she had my strength,” said Anne, in a voice fine and trenchant as a sword.

Nanna and the nurse retired discreetly.

The parents looked at each other over the frail body of the little girl.  Majendie’s face had flushed under his wife’s blow.  He knew that she was thinking of Edith and her fate.  The same malady had appeared in more than one member of his family, as Anne was well aware. (Her own strain was pure.) Instinctively he put his hand to the child’s spine.  Little Peggy sat up straight and strong enough.  And another thought passed through him.  His eyes conveyed it to Anne as plainly as if he had said, “I don’t know about her mother’s strength.  She’s the child of her mother’s coldness.”

He set the child down on Anne’s lap, told her to be good there, and left them.

Anne saw how she had hurt him, and was visited with an unfamiliar pang of self-reproach.  She was very nice to him all that evening.  And out of his own pain a kinder thought came to him.  He had been the cause of great unhappiness to Anne.  There might be a sense in which the child was suffering from her mother’s martyrdom.  He persuaded himself that the least he could do was to leave Anne in supreme possession of her.

CHAPTER XX

What with anxiety about his daughter and his sister, and a hopeless attachment to his wife, Majendie’s misery became so acute that it told upon his health.  His friends, Gorst and the Hannays, noticed the change and spent themselves in persistent efforts to cheer him.  And, at times when his need of distraction became imperious, he declined from Anne’s lofty domesticities upon the Hannays.  He liked to go over in the evening, and sit with Mrs. Hannay, and talk about his child.  Mrs. Hannay was never tired of listening.  The subject drew her out quite remarkably, so that Mrs. Hannay, always soft and kind, showed at her very softest and kindest.  To talk to her was like resting an aching head upon the down cushion to which it was impossible not to compare her.  It was the Hannays’ bitter misfortune that they had no children; but this frustration had left them hearts more hospitably open to their friends.