water that had run along the nose of the old
four-wheeler man.

But while he seemed to listen, Felix thought: 'I wish to God I were made
of leather; then I shouldn't feel as if I'd lost the warmth inside me. I
mustn't let her see. Fathers ARE queer--I always suspected that. There
goes my work for a good week!' Then he answered:

"No, my dear, the world is not heartless; it's only arranged according to
certain necessary contraries: No pain, no pleasure; no dark, no light,
and the rest of it. If you think, it couldn't be arranged differently."

As he spoke a blackbird came running with a chuckle from underneath the
berberis, looked at them with alarm, and ran back. Nedda raised her
face.

"Dad, I mean to do something with my life!"

Felix answered:

"Yes. That's right."

But long after Nedda had fallen into dreams that night, he lay awake,
with his left foot enclosed between Floras', trying to regain that sense
of warmth which he knew he must never confess to having lost.

CHAPTER XV

Flora took the news rather with the air of a mother-dog that says to her
puppy: "Oh, very well, young thing! Go and stick your teeth in it and
find out for yourself!" Sooner or later this always happened, and
generally sooner nowadays. Besides, she could not help feeling that she
would get more of Felix, to her a matter of greater importance than she
gave sign of. But inwardly the news had given her a shock almost as
sharp as that felt by him. Was she really the mother of one old enough
to love? Was the child that used to cuddle up to her in the window-seat
to be read to, gone from her; that used to rush in every morning at all
inconvenient moments of her toilet; that used to be found sitting in the
dark on the stairs, like a little sleepy owl, because, for-sooth, it was
so 'cosey'?

Not having seen Derek, she did not as yet share her husband's anxiety on
that score, though his description was dubious:

"Upstanding young cockerel, swinging his sporran and marching to pipes--a
fine spurn about him! Born to trouble, if I know anything, trying to
sweep the sky with his little broom!"

"Is he a prig?"

"No-o. There's simplicity about his scorn, and he seems to have been
brought up on facts, not on literature, like most of these young monkeys.
The cousinship I don't think matters; Kirsteen brings in too strong an
out-strain. He's HER son, not Tod's. But perhaps," he added, sighing,
"it won't last."

Flora