Samuel Povey, walking to and fro, began to enter into details of his hasty journey to Axe.  Old Mrs. Baines, having beheld her grandson, was preparing to quit this world.  Never again would she exclaim, in her brusque tone of genial ruthlessness:  ‘Fiddlesticks!’ The situation was very difficult and distressing, for Constance could not leave her baby, and she would not, until the last urgency, run the risks of a journey with him to Axe.  He was being weaned.  In any case Constance could not have undertaken the nursing of her mother.  A nurse had to be found.  Mr. Povey had discovered one in the person of Mrs. Gilchrist, the second wife of a farmer at Malpas in Cheshire, whose first wife had been a sister of the late John Baines.  All the credit of Mrs. Gilchrist was due to Samuel Povey.  Mrs. Baines fretted seriously about Sophia, who had given no sign of life for a very long time.  Mr. Povey went to Manchester and ascertained definitely from the relatives of Scales that nothing was known of the pair.  He did not go to Manchester especially on this errand.  About once in three weeks, on Tuesdays, he had to visit the Manchester warehouses; but the tracking of Scales’s relative cost him so much trouble and time that, curiously, he came to believe that he had gone to Manchester one Tuesday for no other end.  Although he was very busy indeed in the shop, he flew over to Axe and back whenever he possibly could, to the neglect of his affairs.  He was glad to do all that was in his power; even if he had not done it graciously his sensitive, tyrannic conscience would have forced him to do it.  But nevertheless he felt rather virtuous, and worry and fatigue and loss of sleep intensified this sense of virtue.

“So that if there is any sudden change they will telegraph,” he finished, to Constance.

She raised her head.  The words, clinching what had led up to them, drew her from her dream and she saw, for a moment, her mother in an agony.

“But you don’t surely mean—?” she began, trying to disperse the painful vision as unjustified by the facts.

“My dear girl,” said Samuel, with head singing, and hot eyes, and a consciousness of high tension in every nerve of his body, “I simply mean that if there’s any sudden change they will telegraph.”

While they had tea, Samuel sitting opposite to his wife, and Miss Insull nearly against the wall (owing to the moving of the table), the baby rolled about on the hearthrug, which had been covered with a large soft woollen shawl, originally the property of his great-grandmother.  He had no cares, no responsibilities.  The shawl was so vast that he could not clearly distinguish objects beyond its confines.  On it lay an indiarubber ball, an indiarubber doll, a rattle, and fan.  He vaguely recollected all four items, with their respective properties.  The fire also was an old friend.  He had occasionally tried to touch it, but a high bright fence always came in between.