He was silent awhile. The thought of parting from the child, the living memory of his dead wife; was a pang whose intensity he could not express even to Ella. She was seven. For four years he had brought her up alone in his own house, under the care of an old family servant who had taught her to read, and say her prayers, and use her knife and fork in a way befitting her station. The rest of her tiny education Sylvester himself had seen to. She was his constant companion, abroad and at home.
He could talk to her as it was in his power to—talk to no one else, almost persuading himself that her innocent clear eyes saw into the depths of his heart. To leave her behind was a prospect filled with unspeakable dismay.
“It's a weary world,” he said, by way of generalisation.
“It isn't!” cried Ella. “It's a glorious world, full of love and heroism and beauty. I won't have my dear world abused! It is sweet to be alive in it, to use all one's faculties, to go about among men and women, to hear the rain, to smell the hay—”
“And get hay fever and then come to me—the misanthrope—to cure you. Paganism generally ends that way.”
“I should call your being able to cure me a very beautiful thing too,” she exclaimed conclusively. “Isn't your knowledge of healing a glorious thing?”
“Oh, don't tell me about the child gathering pebbles by the sea-shore.” It was modesty on Newton's part, but mock modesty on that of the people who quote him now. “Children can pick up a tremendous lot of pebbles in two hundred years!”
The door opened and Matthew Lanyon stood on the threshold, with an amused smile on his grave face. For the girl had been speaking with animation, and the fresh colour in her cheeks and the happiness in her eyes made her goodly to look upon.
“Syl annihilated as usual?” he asked, coming forward.
“I hope so. He won't be converted, Uncle Matthew. What do you think of the world? Isn't it a beautiful world?”