The children

The children, at first, had been unanimously and immovably opposed to going to Monreale.

Long before the steamer headed for Palermo the question was debated by them with a searching thoroughness. Judith, who had never been to Sicily, had consulted Boyne as to the most profitable way of employing the one day allotted to them, and after inclining to Segesta, Boyne, on finding that everybody, including Chip, was to be of the party, suggested Monreale as more accessible.

“And awfully beautiful too?” Judith was looking at him with hungry ignorant eyes.

“One of the most beautiful things in the world. The mosaics alone....”

She clasped ecstatic hands. “We must go there! I’ve seen so little—”

“Why, I thought you’d travelled from one end of Europe to the other.”

“That doesn’t show you anything but sleeping-cars and Palace Hotels, does it? Mother and father never even have a guide-book; they just ask the hall-porter where to go. And then something always seems to prevent their going. You must show me everything, everything.”

“Well, we’ll begin with Monreale.”

But the children took a different view. Miss Scope, unluckily, had found an old Baedeker on the steamer, and refreshing her mind with hazy reminiscences gleaned from former pupils, had rediscovered the name of a wonderful ducal garden containing ever so many acres of orange-trees always full of flowers and fruit. Her old pupils had gone there, she recalled, and been allowed by the gardeners to pick up from the ground as many oranges as they could carry away.

At this the children, a close self-governing body, instantly voted as one man for the Giardino Aumale. Boyne had already observed that, in spite of Judith’s strong influence, there were moments when she became helpless against their serried opposition, and in the present case argument and persuasion entirely failed. At length Terry, evidently wishing, as the man of the party, to set the example of reasonableness, remarked that Judith, who had all the bother of looking after them, ought to go wherever she chose. Bun hereupon squared his mouth for a howl, and Blanca observed tartly that by always pretending to give up you generally got what you wanted. “Well, you’d better try then,” Terry retorted severely, and the blood rose under his sister’s delicate skin as if he had struck her.

“Terry! What a beast you are! I didn’t mean—”

Meanwhile Beechy, melting into tears at the sight of Bun’s distress, was hugging his tumbled head against her breast with murmurs of: “Zitto, zitto, carissimo! Cuor mio!” and glaring angrily at Judith and Terry.

“Well, I want to go where there’s zoranges to eat,” said Zinnie, in her sharp metallic American voice, with which she might almost have peeled the fruit. “—’r if I don’t, I want something a lot better’nstead, n’ I mean to have it!”

Boyne laughed, and Judith murmured despairingly: “We’d better go to their orange-garden.”

“Look here,” Terry interposed, “the little ones are mad to hear the end of that story of the old old times, about the two children who’d never seen a motor. They’re all so fed up with airships and machinery and X rays and wireless; and you know you promised to go on with that story some day. Why couldn’t we go to the place you want to see, and you’ll promise and swear to finish the story there, and to have chocolates for tea?”

“Oh—and oranges; I’ll supply the oranges,” Boyne interposed. “There’s a jolly garden next to the cloister, and I’ll persuade the guardian to let us in, and we’ll have a picnic tea there.”

“An’masses of zoranges?” Zinnie stipulated, with a calculating air, while Beechy surreptitiously dried Bun’s tears on her crumpled pinafore, and Bun, heartlessly forsaking her to turn handsprings on the deck, shrieked out: “Noranges! Noranges! NORANGES!”

“Oh, very well; I knew—” Blanca murmured, shooting her gray glance toward Boyne; and Judith, lifting up Chip, triumphantly declared: “He says he wants to go to Monreale.”

“That settles it, of course,” said Blanca, with resigned eyelids.

A wordy wrangle having arisen between Zinnie, Beechy and Bun as to whether the fruit for which they clamoured should be called zoranges or noranges, Judith and Miss Scope took advantage of the diversion to settle the details of the expedition with Boyne, and the next morning, when the steamer lay to off Palermo, the little party, equipped and eager, headed the line of passengers for the tug.

Boyne, stretched out at length on a stone bench in the sun, lay listening with half-closed eyes to Judith’s eager plaintive voice. He had bribed the custodian to let them pass out of the cloister into the lavender-scented cathedral garden drowsing on its warm terrace above the orange-orchards. Far off across the plain the mountains descended in faint sapphire gradations to the denser sapphire of the sea, along which the domed and towered city gleamed uncertainly. And here, close by, sat Judith Wheater in the sun, the children heaped at her knee, and Scopy and Nanny, at a discreet distance, knitting, and nursing the tea-basket. Judith’s voice went on: “But when Polycarp and Lullaby drove home in the victoria with the white horse to their mamma’s palace they found that the zebra door-mat had got up and was eating all the flowers in the drawing-room vases, and the big yellow birds on the wall-paper were all flying about, and making the most dreadful mess scattering seeds about the rooms. But the most wonderful thing was that the cuckoo from the nursery clock was gone too, so that the nurses couldn’t tell what time it was, and when the children ought to be put to bed and to get up again....”

“Oh, how perfectly lovely,” chanted Bun, and Beechy chorused: “Lovelly, lovelly....”

“Not at all,” said Judith severely. “It was the worst thing that had happened to them yet, for the cook didn’t know what time it was either, and nobody in the house could tell her, so there was no breakfast ready; and the cook just went off for a ride on the zebra, because she had no carriage of her own, and she said there was nothing else to do.”

“Why didn’t they tell their father’n’mother?” Zinnie queried in a practical tone.

“Because they’d got new ones, who didn’t know about the cuckoo either, I guess,” said Bun with authority.

“Then why didn’t the children go with their old fathers an’ mothers?” Zinnie inserted.

“Because their old mother’s friend, Sally Money, wasn’t big enough ... big enough ... big enough ... for her to take them all with her....” Bun broke off, visibly puzzled as to what was likely to follow.

“Big enough to take them all on her back and carry them away with her. But I daresay the new father and mother would have been all right,” Judith pursued, “if only the children had been patient and known how to treat them; only just at first they didn’t; and besides, at the time I am telling you about, they happened to be away travelling—”

“Then why didn’t the children telephone to them to come back?”

“Because there weren’t any telephones in those days.”

“No telephones? Does it say so in the hist’ry books?” snapped Zinnie, sceptical.

“Course it does, you silly. Why, when Scopy was little,” Terry reminded them, “she lived in a house where there wasn’t any telephone.”

Beechy, ever tender-hearted, immediately prepared to cry at the thought of Scopy’s privation; but Scopy interpolated severely: “Now, Beatrice, don’t be foreign—” and the story-teller went on: “So there was no way whatever for them to get any breakfast, and—”

“Oh, I know, I know! They starved to death, poverini!” Beechy lamented, promptly transferring her grief to another object, and flinging her little brown arms heavenward in an agony of participation.

“Not just yet. For they met on the edge of the wood—”

(“What wood? There wasn’t any wood before,” said Zinnie sharply.)

“No, but there was one now; for all the trees and flowers from the wall-papers had come off the wall, and gone out into the garden to grow, so that the big yellow birds should have a wood to build their nests in, and the zebras should—”

“Zebras! There was only one zebra.” This, sardonically, from a grown-up looking, indifferent Blanca.

“Stupid! He’d been married already and had a lot of perfectly lovely norphans and three dear little steps like us, and Mrs. Zebra she had a big family too, no, she had two big families,” Zinnie announced, enumerating the successive groups on her small dimpled fingers.

“Oh, how lovely for the zebra! Then all the little zebras stayed together always afterward—f’rever and ever. Say they did—oh, Judith, say it!” Beechy clamoured.

“Of course they did. (Zinnie, you mustn’t call Blanca stupid.) But all this time Polycarp and Lullaby were starving, because the clock had stopped and the cook had gone out on the zebra....”

“And they were starving—slowly starving to death ...” Zinnie gloated.

“Yes; but on the edge of the wood whom did they meet but a great big tall gentleman with a mot—no, I mean a pony-carriage....”

“What’s a pony?”

“A little horse about as big as Bun—”

(“Oh, oh—I’m a pony!” shouted Bun, kicking and neighing.)

“And the pony-carriage was full—absolutely brim full of—what do you think?” Judith concluded, her question drowned in a general cry of “Oranges! No, noranges—zoranges!!!” from the leaping scrambling group before whom, at the dramatic moment, Boyne had obligingly uncorded his golden bales, while Miss Scope and Nanny murmured: “Now, children, children—now—”

“And this is our chance,” said Boyne, “to make a dash for the cathedral.”

He slipped his hand through Judith’s arm, and drew her across the cloister and into the great echoing basilica. At first, after their long session on the sun-drenched terrace, the place seemed veiled in an impenetrable twilight. But gradually the tremendous walls and spandrils began to glow with their own supernatural radiance, the solid sunlight of gold and umber and flame-coloured mosaics, against which figures of saints, prophets, kings and sages stood out in pale solemn hues. Boyne led the girl toward one of the shafts of the nave, and they sat down on its projecting base.

“Now from here you can see—”

But he presently perceived that she could see nothing. Her little profile was studiously addressed to the direction in which he pointed, and her head thrown back so that her lips were parted, and her long lashes drew an upward curve against her pale skin; but nothing was happening in the face which was usually the theatre of such varied emotions.

She sat thus for a long time, and he did not move or speak again. Finally she turned to him, and said in a shy voice (it was the first time he had noticed any shyness in her): “I suppose I’m much more ignorant than you could possibly have imagined.”

“You mean that you don’t particularly care for all this?”

She lowered her voice to answer: “I believe all those big people up there frighten me a little.” And she added: “I’m glad I didn’t bring Chip.”

“Child!” He let his hand fall on hers with a faint laugh. What a child she became as soon as she was away from the other children!

“But I do want to admire it, you know,” she went on earnestly, “because you do, and Scopy says you know such a lot about everything.”

“It’s not a question of knowing—” he began; and then broke off. For wasn’t it, after all, exactly that? How many thousand threads of association, strung with stored images of the eye and brain, memories of books, of pictures, of great names and deeds, ran between him and those superhuman images, tracing a way from his world to theirs? Yes; it had been stupid of him to expect that a child of fifteen or sixteen, brought up in complete ignorance of the past, and with no more comprehension than a savage of the subtle and allusive symbolism of art, should feel anything in Monreale but the oppression of its awful unreality. And yet he was disappointed, for he was already busy at the masculine task of endowing the woman of the moment with every quality which made life interesting to himself.

“Woman—but she’s not a woman! She’s a child.” His thinking of her as anything else was the crowning absurdity of the whole business. Obscurely irritated with himself and her, he stood up, turning his back impatiently on the golden abyss of the apse. “Come along; it’s chilly here after our sun-bath. Gardens are best, after all.”

In the doorway she paused a moment and sent her gaze a little wistfully down the mighty perspective they were leaving. “Some day, I know, I shall want to come back here,” she said.

“Oh, well, we’ll come back together,” he replied perfunctorily.

But outside in the sunlight, with the children leaping about her, and guiding her with joyful cries toward the outspread tea-things, she was instantly woman again—gay, competent, composed, and wholly mistress of the situation....

Yes; decidedly, the more Boyne saw of her the more she perplexed him, the more difficult he found it to situate her in time and space. He did not even know how old she was—somewhere between fifteen and seventeen, he conjectured—nor had he as yet made up his mind if she were pretty. In the cathedral, just now, he had thought her almost plain, with the dull droop of her mouth, her pale complexion which looked dead when unlit by gaiety, her thick brown hair, just thick and just brown, without the magic which makes some women’s hair as alive as their lips, and her small impersonal nose, a nose neither perfectly drawn like Blanca’s nor impudently droll like Zinnie’s. The act of thus cataloguing her seemed to reduce her to a bundle of negatives; yet here in the sunshine, her hat thrown off her rumpled hair, and all the children scrambling over her, her mouth became a flame, her eyes fountains of laughter, her thin frail body a quiver of light—he didn’t know how else to put it. Whatever she was, she was only intermittently; as if her body were the mere vehicle of her moods, the projection of successive fears, hopes, ardours, with hardly any material identity of its own. Strange, he mused, that such an imponderable and elusive creature should be the offspring of the two solid facts he recalled the Cliffe Wheaters as being. For a reminder of Joyce Mervin as he had known her, tall, vigorous and substantial, one must turn to Blanca, not Judith. If Blanca had not had to spare a part of herself for the making of Terry she would have been the reproduction of her mother. But Judith was like a thought, a vision, an aspiration—all attributes to which Mrs. Cliffe Wheater could never have laid claim. And Boyne, when the tired and sleepy party were piled once more into the motor, had not yet decided what Judith looked like, and still less if he really thought her pretty.

He fell asleep that night composing a letter to the lady in the Dolomites. “... what you would think. A strange little creature who changes every hour, hardly seems to have any personality of her own except when she’s mothering her flock. Then she’s extraordinary: playmate, mother and governess all in one; and the best of each in its way. As for her very self, when she’s not with them, you grope for her identity and find an instrument the wind plays on, a looking-glass that reflects the clouds, a queer little sensitive plate, very little and very sensitive—” and with a last flash of caution, just as sleep overcame him, he added: “Unluckily not in the least pretty.”

“I’m so much interested in your picturesque description of the little-girl-mother (sounds almost as nauseating as ‘child-wife,’ doesn’t it?) who is conducting that heterogeneous family across Europe, while the parents are jazzing at Venice. What an instance of modern manners; no, not manners—there are none left—but customs! I’m sure if I saw the little creature I should fall in love with her—as you are obviously doing. Luckily you’ll be parting soon, or I should expect to see you arrive here with the girl-bride of the movies and a tribe of six (or is it seven?) adopted children. Don’t imagine, though, that in that case I should accept the post of governess.” And then, p.s.: “Of course she’s awfully pretty, or you wouldn’t have taken so much pains to say that she’s not.”

One of Rose Sellars’s jolly letters: clever, understanding and humorous. Why did Boyne feel a sudden flatness in it? Something just a trifle mincing, self-conscious—prepared? Yes; if Mrs. Sellars excelled in one special art it was undoubtedly that of preparation. She led up to things—the simplest things—with the skill of a clever rider putting a horse at a five-barred gate. All her life had been a series of adaptations, arrangements, shifting of lights, lowering of veils, pulling about of screens and curtains. No one could arrange a room half so well; and she had arranged herself and her life just as skilfully. The material she had had to deal with was poor enough; in every way unworthy of her; but, as her clever hands could twist a scarf into a divan-cover, and ruffle a bit of paper into a lamp-shade, so she had managed, out of mediocre means, a mediocre husband, an ugly New York house, and a dull New York set, to make something distinguished, personal, almost exciting—so that, in her little world, people were accustomed to say “Rose Sellars” as a synonym for cleverness and originality.

Yes; she had had the art to do that, and to do it quietly, unobtrusively, by a touch here, a hint there, without ever reaching out beyond her domestic and social frame-work. Her originality, in the present day, lay in this consistency and continuity. It was what had drawn Boyne to her in the days of his big wanderings, when, returning from an arduous engineering job in Rumania or Brazil or Australia, he would find, in his ever-shifting New York, the one fixed pole of Mrs. Sellars’s front door, always the same front door at the same number of the same street, with the same Whistler etchings and Sargent water-colours on the drawing-room walls, and the same quiet welcome to the same fireside.

In his homeless years that sense of her stability had appealed to him peculiarly: the way, each time he returned, she had simply added a little more to herself, like a rose unfurling another petal. A rose in full sun would have burst into quicker bloom; it was part of Mrs. Sellars’s case that she had always, as Heine put it, been like a canary in a window facing north. Not due north, however, but a few points north by west; so that she caught, not the sun’s first glow, but its rich decline. He could never think of her as having been really young, immaturely young, like this girl about whom they were exchanging humorous letters, and who, in certain other ways, had a precocity of experience so far beyond Mrs. Sellars’s. But the question of a woman’s age was almost always beside the point. When a man loved a woman she was always the age he wanted her to be; when he had ceased to, she was either too old for witchery or too young for technique. “And five years is too long a time,” he summed it up again, with a faint return of the apprehension he always felt when he thought of his next meeting with Mrs. Sellars.

Five years was too long; and these five, in particular, had transformed the situation, and perhaps its heroine. It was a new Rose Sellars whom he was to meet. When they had parted she was still a wife—resigned, exemplary, and faithful in spite of his pleadings; now she was a widow. The word was full of disturbing implications, and Boyne had already begun to wonder how much of her attraction had been due to the fact that she was unattainable. It was all very well to say that he “wasn’t that kind of man”—the kind to tire of a woman as soon as she could be had. That was all just words; in matters of sex and sentiment, as he knew, a man was a different kind of man in every case that presented itself. Only by going to the Dolomites to see her could he really discover what it was that he had found so haunting in Rose Sellars. So he was going.

“Mr. Boyne—could we have a quiet talk, do you think?”

Boyne, driven from the deck by the heat and glare, and the activities of the other passengers, was lying on his bed, book in hand, in a state of after-luncheon apathy. His small visitor leaned in the doorway, slender and gray-clad: Terry Wheater, with the faint pinkness on his cheek-bones, the brilliance in his long-lashed eyes, that made his honest boy’s face at times so painfully beautiful.

“Why, of course, old man. Come in. You’ll be better off here than on deck till it gets cooler.”

Terry tossed aside his cap and dropped into the chair at Boyne’s bedside. They had shared a cabin for nearly a fortnight, and reached the state of intimacy induced by such nearness when it does not result in hate; but Boyne had had very few chances to talk with the boy. Terry was always asleep when the older man turned in, and Boyne himself was up and out long before Terry, kept in bed by the vigilant Miss Scope, had begun his leisurely toilet. Boyne, by now, had formed a fairly clear idea of the characteristics of the various young Wheaters, but Terry was perhaps the one with whom he had spent the least time; and the boy’s rather solemn tone, and grown-up phraseology, made him lay aside his book with a touch of curiosity.

“What can I do for you, Terry?”

“Persuade them that I ought to have a tutor.”

“Them?”

“I mean the Wheaters—father and mother,” Terry corrected himself. The children, Boyne knew, frequently referred to their parents by their surname. The habit of doing so, Miss Scope had explained, rose from the fact that, in the case of most of the playmates of their wandering life, the names “father” and “mother” had to be applied, successively or simultaneously, to so many different persons; indeed one surprising little girl with black curls and large pearl earrings, whom they had met the year before at Biarritz, had the habit of handing to each new playmate a typed table of her parents’ various marriages and her own successive adoptions. “So they all do it now; that is, speak of their different sets of parents by their names. And my children have picked up the habit from the others, though in their own case, luckily, it’s no longer necessary, now that their papa and mamma have come together again.”

“I mean father and mother,” Terry repeated. “Make them understand that I must be educated. There’s no time to lose. And you could.” His eyes were fixed feverishly—alas, too feverishly—on Boyne’s, and his face had the air of precocious anxiety which sometimes made Judith look so uncannily mature.

“My dear chap—of course I’ll do anything I can for you. But I don’t believe I shall be seeing your people this time. I’m going to jump into the train the minute we get to Venice.”

The boy’s face fell. “You are? I’m sorry. And Judy will be awfully sold.”

“That’s very good of her—and of you. But you see—”

“Oh, I can see that a solid fortnight of the lot of us is a good deal for anybody,” Terry acquiesced. “All the same, Judy and I did hope you’d stay in Venice for a day or two. We thought, you see, there were a good many things you could do for us.”

Boyne continued to consider him thoughtfully. “I should be very glad if I could. But I’m afraid you overrate my influence. I haven’t seen your parents for years. They’d hardly remember me.”

“That’s just it: you’d be a novelty,” said Terry astutely.

“Well—if that’s an inducement.... Anyhow, you may be sure I’ll do what I can ... if I find I can alter my plans....”

“Oh, if you could! You see I’ve really never had anybody to speak for me. Scopy cuts no ice with them, and of course they think Judy’s too young to know about education—specially as she’s never had any herself. She can’t even spell, you know. She writes stomach with a k. And they’ve let me go on like this, just with nurses and nursery-governesses (that’s really all Scopy is), as if I wasn’t any older than Bun, when I’m at an age when most fellows are leaving their preparatory schools.” The boy’s face coloured with the passion of his appeal, and the flush remained in two sharp patches on his cheeks.

“Of course,” he went on, “Judy says I’m not fair to them—that I don’t remember what a lot they’ve had to spend for me on doctors and climate, and all that. And they did send me to school once, and I had to be taken away because of my beastly temperature.... I know all that. But it was a sell, when I left school, just to come back again to Scopy and Nanny, and nobody a fellow could put a question to, or get a tip from about what other fellows are learning. Last summer, at St. Moritz, I met a boy not much older than I am who was rather delicate too, and he’d just got a new father who was a great reader, and who had helped him no end, and got a tutor for him; and he’d started Cæsar, and was getting up his Greek verbs—with a temperature every evening too. And I said to Judy: ‘Now, look at that.’ And she said, yes, it would be splendid for me to have a tutor. And for two weeks the other fellow’s father let me work a little with him. But then we had to go away—one of our troubles,” Terry interrupted himself, “is that we’re so everlastingly going away. But I suppose it’s always so with children—isn’t it?—with all the different parents they’re divided up among, and all the parents living in different places, and fighting so about when the children are to go to which, and the lawyers always changing things just as you think they’re arranged.... Of course a chap must expect to be moving about when he’s young. But Scopy says that later parents settle down.” He added this on a note of interrogation, and Boyne, feeling that an answer was expected, declared with conviction: “Oh, but they do—by Jove, they do!”

Inwardly he was recalling the warm cocoon of habit in which his own nursery and school years had been enveloped, giving time for a screen of familiar scenes and faces to form itself about him before he was thrust upon the world. What had struck Boyne first about the little tribe generically known as the Wheaters was that they were so exposed, so bared to the blast—as if they had missed some stage of hidden growth for which Palace Hotels and Riviera Expresses afforded no sufficient shelter. He found his gaze unable to bear the too-eager questioning of the boy’s, and understood why Miss Scope looked away when she talked of Terry.

“Settle down? Rather! People naturally tend to as they get older. Aren’t your own parents proving it already? Haven’t you all got together again, so to speak?” Boyne winced at his own exaggerated tone of optimism. It was a delicate matter, in such cases, to catch exactly the right note.

“Yes,” Terry assented. “You’d think so. But I know children who’ve thought so too, and been jolly well sold. The trouble is you can never be sure when parents will really begin to feel old. Especially with all these new ways the doctors have of making them young again. But anyhow,” he went on more hopefully, “if you would put in a word I’m sure it would count a lot. And Judy is sure it would too.”

“Then of course I will. I’ll stop over a day or two, and do all I can,” Boyne assured him, casting plans and dates to the winds.

He was not certain that the appeal had not anticipated a secret yearning of his own; a yearning not so much to postpone his arrival at Cortina (to that he would not confess) as to defer the parting from his new friends, and especially from Judith. The Monreale picnic had been successfully repeated in several other scenes of classic association, and during the gay and clamorous expeditions ashore, and the long blue days on deck, he had been gradually penetrated by the warm animal life which proceeds from a troop of happy healthy children. Everything about the little Wheaters and their “steps” excited his interest and sympathy, and not least the frailness of the tie uniting them, and their determination that it should not be broken. There was something tragic, to Boyne, in the mere fact of this determination—it implied a range of experience and a power of forethought so far beyond a child’s natural imagining. To the ordinary child, Boyne’s memories told him, separation means something too vague to fret about beforehand, and too pleasantly tempered, when it comes, by the excitement of novelty, and the joy of release from routine, to be anything but a jolly adventure. Boyne could not recall that he had ever minded being sent from home (to the seashore, to a summer camp, or to an aunt’s, when a new baby was expected) as long as he was allowed to take his mechanical toys with him. Any place that had a floor on which you could build cranes and bridges and railways was all right: if there was a beach with sand that could be trenched and tunnelled, and water that could be dammed, then it was heaven, even if the porridge wasn’t as good as it was at home, and there was no mother to read stories aloud after supper.

He could only conjecture that what he called change would have seemed permanence to the little Wheaters, and that what change signified to them was something as radical and soul-destroying as it would have been to Boyne to see his mechanical toys smashed, or his white mice left to die of hunger. That it should imply a lasting separation from the warm cluster of people, pets and things called home, would have been no more thinkable to the infant Boyne than permanence was to the infant Wheaters.

Judith had explained that almost all their little friends (usually acquaintances made in the world of Palace Hotels) were in the same case as themselves. As Terry had put it, when you were young you couldn’t expect not to move about; and when Judith proceeded to give Boyne some of the reasons which had leagued her little tribe against the recurrence of such moves he had the sick feeling with which a powerless looker-on sees the torture of an animal. The case of poor Doll Westway, for instance, who was barely a year older than Judith, and whom they had played with for a summer at Deauville; and now—!

Well, it was all a damned rotten business—that was what it was. And Judith’s resolve that her children should never again be exposed to these hazards thrilled Boyne like the gesture of a Joan of Arc. As the character of each became more definite to him, as he measured the distance between Blanca’s cool self-absorption, tempered only by a nervous craving for her twin brother’s approval, and the prodigal self-abandonment of Beechy, as he compared the detached and downright Zinnie to the sinuous and selfish Bun, and watched the interplay of all these youthful characters, he marvelled that the bond of Judith Wheater’s love for them should be stronger than the sum of such heredities. But so it was. He had seen how they could hang together against their sister when some childish whim united them, and now he could imagine what an impenetrable front they would present under her leadership. Of course the Cliffe Wheaters would stay together if their children were determined that they should; and of course they would give Terry a tutor if he wanted one. How was it possible for any one to look at Terry and not give him what he wanted, Boyne wondered? At any rate, he, Boyne, meant to accompany the party to Venice and see the meeting. Incidentally, he was beginning to be curious about seeing the Wheaters themselves.