‘Pleasant to see you established here, if you find the place agreeable,’ he said.

She was kissing her hand to her brother, all her eyes for him—­or for the couple; and they were hidden by the park lodge before she replied:  ’It is an admired, beautiful place.’

‘I came,’ said he, ‘to have your assurance that it suits you.’

‘I thank you, my lord.’

‘"My lord” would like a short rest, Carinthia.’

She seemed placidly acquiescing.  ‘You have seen the boy?’

‘Twice to-day.  We were having a conversation just now.’

‘We think him very intelligent.’

‘Lady Arpington tells me you do the honours here excellently.’

‘She is good to me.’

’Praises the mother’s management of the young one.  John Edward:  Edward for call-name.  Madge boasts his power for sleeping.’

‘He gives little trouble.’

’And babes repay us!  We learn from small things.  Out of the mouth of babes wisdom?  Well, their habits show the wisdom of the mother.  A good mother!  There’s no higher title.  A lady of my acquaintance bids fair to win it, they say.’

Carinthia looked in simplicity, saw herself, and said ’If a mother may rear her boy till he must go to school, she is rewarded for all she does.’

‘Ah,’ said he, nodding over her mania of the perpetual suspicion.  ‘Leddings, Queeney, the servants here, run smoothly?’

‘They do:  they are happy in serving.’

’You see, we English are not such bad fellows when we’re known.  The climate to-day, for example, is rather trying.’

‘I miss colours most in England,’ said Carinthia.  ’I like the winds.  Now and then we have a day to remember.’

’We ’re to be “the artist of the day,” Gower Woodseer says, and we get an attachment to the dreariest; we are to study “small variations of the commonplace”—­dear me!  But he may be right.  The “sky of lead and scraped lead” over those lines, he points out; and it’s not a bad trick for reconciling us to gloomy English weather.  You take lessons from him?’

‘I can always learn from him,’ said Carinthia.

Fleetwood depicted his plodding Gower at the tussle with account-books.  She was earnest in sympathy; not awake to the comical; dull as the clouds, dull as the discourse.  Yet he throbbed for being near her took impression of her figure, the play of her features, the carriage of her body.

He was shut from her eyes.  The clear brown eyes gave exchange of looks; less of admission than her honest maid’s.

Madge and the miracle infant awaited them on the terrace.  For so foreign did the mother make herself to him, that the appearance of the child, their own child, here between them, was next to miraculous; and the mother, who might well have been the most astonished, had transparently not an idea beyond the verified palpable lump of young life she lifted in her arms out of the arms of Madge, maternally at home with its presence on earth.