democracy against autocracy, of a man’s right to do as he likes with his life if he harms not others; of ‘the Land’ against the fetterers of ‘the Land.’  And he was artist enough to see how from that little starting episode the whole business had sprung—­given, of course, the entrance of the wilful force called love.  But a father, especially when he has been thoroughly alarmed, gives the artist and philosopher in him short shrift.

Nedda came home soon after Sheila went, and to the eyes of Felix she came back too old and thoughtful altogether.  How different a girl from the Nedda who had so wanted ‘to know everything’ that first night of May!  What was she brooding over, what planning, in that dark, round, pretty head?  At what resolve were those clear eyes so swiftly raised to look?  What was going on within, when her breast heaved so, without seeming cause, and the color rushed up in her cheeks at a word, as though she had been so far away that the effort of recall was alone enough to set all her veins throbbing.  And yet Felix could devise no means of attack on her infatuation.  For a man cannot cultivate the habit of never interfering and then suddenly throw it over; least of all when the person to be interfered with is his pet and only daughter.

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: