Flora, not of course in the swim of those happenings at Joyflelds, could not be got to take the matter very seriously.  In fact—­ beyond what concerned Felix himself and poetry—­the matter that she did take seriously had yet to be discovered.  Hers was one of those semi-detached natures particularly found in Hampstead.  When exhorted to help tackle the question, she could only suggest that Felix should take them all abroad when he had finished ’The Last of the Laborers.’  A tour, for instance, in Norway and Sweden, where none of them had ever been, and perhaps down through Finland into Russia.

Feeling like one who squirts on a burning haystack with a garden syringe, Felix propounded this scheme to his little daughter.  She received it with a start, a silence, a sort of quivering all over, as of an animal who scents danger.  She wanted to know when, and being told—­’not before the middle of August’, relapsed into her preoccupation as if nothing had been said.  Felix noted on the hall table one afternoon a letter in her handwriting, addressed to a Worcester newspaper, and remarked thereafter that she began to receive this journal daily, obviously with a view to reports of the coming assizes.  Once he tried to break through into her confidence.  It was August Bank Holiday, and they had gone out on to the heath together to see the people wonderfully assembled.  Coming back across the burnt-up grass, strewn with paper bags, banana peel, and the cores of apples, he hooked his hand into her arm.

“What is to be done with a child that goes about all day thinking and thinking and not telling anybody what she is thinking?”

She smiled round at him and answered: 

“I know, Dad.  She is a pig, isn’t she?”

This comparison with an animal of proverbial stubbornness was not encouraging.  Then his hand was squeezed to her side and he heard her murmur: 

“I wonder if all daughters are such beasts!”

He understood well that she had meant:  ’There is only one thing I want—­one thing I mean to have—­one thing in the world for me now!’

And he said soberly: 

“We can’t expect anything else.”

“Oh, Daddy!” she answered, but nothing more.

Only four days later she came to his study with a letter, and a face so flushed and troubled that he dropped his pen and got up in alarm.

“Read this, Dad!  It’s impossible!  It’s not true!  It’s terrible!  Oh!  What am I to do?”

The letter ran thus, in a straight, boyish handwriting: 

“Royal Charles hostel,

“Worcester, Aug. 7th.

“My Nedda,