“Why has she not come?” he said.

Bianca winced behind her veil.  “Have you asked Hilary?”

“I cannot find him,” answered Mr. Stone.  Something about his patient stooping figure and white head, on which the sunlight was falling, made Bianca slip her hand through his arm.

“Come in, Dad.  I’ll do your copying.”

Mr. Stone looked at her intently, and shook his head.

“It would be against my principles; I cannot take an unpaid service.  But if you would come, my dear, I should like to read to you.  It is stimulating.”

At that request Bianca’s eyes grew dim.  Pressing Mr. Stone’s shaggy arm against her breast, she moved with him towards the house.

“I think I may have written something that will interest you,” Mr. Stone said, as they went along.

“I am sure you have,” Bianca murmured.

“It is universal,” said Mr. Stone; “it concerns birth.  Sit at the table.  I will begin, as usual, where I left off yesterday.”

Bianca took the little model’s seat, resting her chin on her hand, as motionless as any of the statues she had just been viewing.  It almost seemed as if Mr. Stone were feeling nervous.  He twice arranged his papers; cleared his throat; then, lifting a sheet suddenly, took three steps, turned his back on her, and began to read.

“’In that slow, incessant change of form to form, called Life, men, made spasmodic by perpetual action, had seized on a certain moment, no more intrinsically notable than any other moment, and had called it Birth.  This habit of honouring one single instant of the universal process to the disadvantage of all the other instants had done more, perhaps, than anything to obfuscate the crystal clearness of the fundamental flux.  As well might such as watch the process of the green, unfolding earth, emerging from the brumous arms of winter, isolate a single day and call it Spring.  In the tides of rhythm by which the change of form to form was governed’”—­Mr. Stone’s voice, which had till then been but a thin, husky murmur, gradually grew louder and louder, as though he were addressing a great concourse—­“’the golden universal haze in which men should have flown like bright wing-beats round the sun gave place to the parasitic halo which every man derived from the glorifying of his own nativity.  To this primary mistake could be traced his intensely personal philosophy.  Slowly but surely there had dried up in his heart the wish to be his brother.’”

He stopped reading suddenly.

“I see him coming in,” he said.

The next minute the door opened, and Hilary entered.

“She has not come,” said Mr. Stone; and Bianca murmured: 

“We miss her!”

“Her eyes,” said Mr. Stone, “have a peculiar look; they help me to see into the future.  I have noticed the same look in the eyes of female dogs.”

With a little laugh, Bianca murmured again: