“Where have you two sprung from?” he inquired, admitting them into the hall.
Mr. Stone gave him no answer, but passed into the drawing-room, and sat down on the verge of the first chair he came across, leaning forward with his hands between his knees.
Stephen, after one dry glance at him, turned to his daughter.
“My child,” he said softly, “what have you brought the old boy here for? If there happens to be anything of the high mammalian order for dinner, your mother will have a fit.”
Thyme answered: “Don't chaff, Father!”
Stephen, who was very fond of her, saw that for some reason she was not herself. He examined her with unwonted gravity. Thyme turned away from him. He heard, to his alarm, a little gulping sound.
“My dear!” he said.
Conscious of her sentimental weakness, Thyme made a violent effort.
“I've seen a baby dead,” she cried in a quick, hard voice; and, without another word, she ran upstairs.
In Stephen there was a horror of emotion amounting almost to disease. It would have been difficult to say when he had last shown emotion; perhaps not since Thyme was born, and even then not to anyone except himself, having first locked the door, and then walked up and down, with his teeth almost meeting in the mouthpiece of his favourite pipe. He was unaccustomed, too, to witness this weakness on the part of other people. His looks and speech unconsciously discouraged it, so that if Cecilia had been at all that way inclined, she must long ago have been healed. Fortunately, she never had been, having too much distrust of her own feelings to give way to them completely. And Thyme, that healthy product of them both, at once younger for her age, and older, than they had ever been, with her incapacity for nonsense, her love for open air and facts—that fresh, rising plant, so elastic and so sane—she had never given them a single moment of uneasiness.