Thyme answered:  “Don’t chaff, Father!”

Stephen, who was very fond of her, saw that for some reason she was not herself.  He examined her with unwonted gravity.  Thyme turned away from him.  He heard, to his alarm, a little gulping sound.

“My dear!” he said.

Conscious of her sentimental weakness, Thyme made a violent effort.

“I’ve seen a baby dead,” she cried in a quick, hard voice; and, without another word, she ran upstairs.

In Stephen there was a horror of emotion amounting almost to disease.  It would have been difficult to say when he had last shown emotion; perhaps not since Thyme was born, and even then not to anyone except himself, having first locked the door, and then walked up and down, with his teeth almost meeting in the mouthpiece of his favourite pipe.  He was unaccustomed, too, to witness this weakness on the part of other people.  His looks and speech unconsciously discouraged it, so that if Cecilia had been at all that way inclined, she must long ago have been healed.  Fortunately, she never had been, having too much distrust of her own feelings to give way to them completely.  And Thyme, that healthy product of them both, at once younger for her age, and older, than they had ever been, with her incapacity for nonsense, her love for open air and facts—­that fresh, rising plant, so elastic and so sane—­she had never given them a single moment of uneasiness.

Stephen, close to his hat-rack, felt soreness in his heart.  Such blows as Fortune had dealt, and meant to deal him, he had borne, and he could bear, so long as there was nothing in his own manner, or in that of others, to show him they were blows.

Hurriedly depositing his hat, he ran to Cecilia.  He still preserved the habit of knocking on her door before he entered, though she had never, so far, answered, “Don’t come in!” because she knew his knock.  The custom gave, in fact, the measure of his idealism.  What he feared, or what he thought he feared, after nineteen years of unchecked entrance, could never have been ascertained; but there it was, that flower of something formal and precise, of something reticent, within his soul.

This time, for once, he did not knock, and found Cecilia hooking up her tea-gown and looking very sweet.  She glanced at him with mild surprise.

“What’s this, Cis,” he said, “about a baby dead?  Thyme’s quite upset about it; and your dad’s in the drawing-room!”

With the quick instinct that was woven into all her gentle treading, Cecilia’s thoughts flew—­she could not have told why—­first to the little model, then to Mrs. Hughs.

“Dead?” she said.  “Oh, poor woman!”

“What woman?” Stephen asked.

“It must be Mrs. Hughs.”

The thought passed darkly through Stephen’s mind:  ’Those people again!  What now?’ He did not express it, being neither brutal nor lacking in good taste.