Fruitless?  There sounded from somewhere in the house a shrill little cry, arresting his thought, and controverting it without a syllable.  Nay, fruitless his life could not be, if his child grew up.  Only the chosen few, the infinitesimal minority of mankind, leave spiritual offspring, or set their single mark upon the earth; the multitude are but parents of a new generation, live but to perpetuate the race.  It is the will of nature, the common lot.  And if indeed it lay within his power to shape a path for this new life, which he, nature’s slave, had called out of nothingness, —­ to obviate one error, to avert one misery, —­ to ensure that, in however slight degree, his son’s existence should be better and happier than his own, —­ was not this a sufficing purpose for the years that remained to him, a recompense adequate to any effort, any sacrifice?

As he sat thus in reverie, the door softly opened, and Alma looked in upon him.

‘Do I interrupt you?’

‘I’m idling.  How is your headache?’

She answered with a careless gesture, and came forward, a letter in her hand.

’Sibyl says she will certainly be starting for home in a few weeks.  Perhaps they’re on the way by now.  You have the same news, I hear.’

‘Yes.  They must come to us straight away,’ replied Harvey, knocking the ash out of his pipe ’Or suppose we go to meet them?  If they come by the Orient Line, they call at Naples.  How would it be to go overland, and make the voyage back with them?’

Alma seemed to like the suggestion, and smiled, but only for a moment.  She had little colour this morning, and looked cold, as she drew up to the fire, holding a white woollen wrap about her shoulders.  A slow and subtle modification of her features was tending to a mature beauty which would make bolder claim than the charm that had characterised her in maidenhood.  It was still remote from beauty of a sensual type, but the outlines, in becoming a little more rounded, more regular, gained in common estimate what they lost to a more refined apprehension.  Her eyes appeared more deliberately conscious of their depth and gleam; her lips, less responsive to the flying thought, grew to an habitual expression —­ not of discontent, but something akin unto it; not of self-will, but something that spoke a spirit neither tranquil nor pliant.

‘Had you anything else?’ she asked, absently.

‘A letter from Mrs. Abbott.’

Alma smiled, with a shade of pleasantry not usual upon her countenance.  Harvey generally read her extracts from these letters.  Their allusion to money imposed the reserve; otherwise they would have passed into Alma’s hands.  From his masculine point of view, Harvey thought the matter indifferent; nothing in his wife’s behaviour hitherto had led him to suppose that she attached importance to it.

‘The usual report of progress?’

’Yes.  I fancy those two children are giving her a good deal of trouble.  She’ll have to send the boy to a boarding school.’