After a tumble one day, Hughie was cautious in running.  ’I shall fall down and break myself.’  Then came distinction between days of the week.  ‘On Sunday I do’ so and so; ‘on Monday days I do’ something else.  He said, ‘Do you remember?’ and what a pity it seemed when at last the dull grown-up word was substituted.  Never again, when rain was falling, would Hughie turn and plead, ‘Father, tell the sun to come out!’ Nor, when he saw the crescent moon in daytime, would he ever grow troubled and exclaim, ‘Someone has broken it!’

It was the rule now that before his bedtime, seven o’clock, Hughie spent an hour in the library, alone with his father.  A golden hour, sacred to memories of the world’s own childhood.  He brought with him the book that was his evening’s choice —­ Grimm, or Andersen, or AEsop.  Already he knew by heart a score of little poems, or passages of verse, which Rolfe, disregarding the inept volumes known as children’s anthologies, chose with utmost care from his favourite singers, and repeated till they were learnt.  Stories from the Odyssey had come in of late; but Polyphemus was a doubtful experiment —­ Hughie dreamt of him.  Great caution, too, was needful in the matter of pathos.  On hearing for the first time Andersen’s tale of the Little Tin Soldier, Hughie burst into tears, and could scarce be comforted.  Grimm was safer; it seemed doubtful whether Andersen was really a child’s book at all, every page touched with the tears of things, every line melodious with sadness.

And all this fostering of the imagination —­ was it right? was it wise?  Harvey worried himself with doubts insoluble.  He had merely obeyed his own instincts.  But perhaps he would be doing far better if he never allowed the child to hear a fairy-tale or a line of poetry.  Why not amuse his mind with facts, train him to the habit of scientific thought?  For all he knew, he might be giving the child a bias which would result in a life’s unhappiness; by teaching him to see only the hard actual face of things, would he not fit him far more surely for citizenship of the world?

He would have liked to talk about the child with Mary Abbott, but there never came an opportunity.  Though it shamed and angered him to be under such constraint, he felt obliged to avoid any private meeting with her.  Alma, he well understood, still nursed the preposterous jealousy which had been in her mind so long; and in the present state of things, dubious, transitional, it behoved him to give no needless occasion of disquiet.  As the months went on, he saw her spirits fail; with the utmost difficulty she was persuaded to leave the house, and for hours at a time she sat as if in melancholy brooding, unwilling to talk or to read.  Harvey tried reading to her, but in the daytime she could not keep her thoughts from wandering, and after dinner it merely sent her to sleep.  Yet she declared that there was nothing to trouble about; she would be herself again before long.