s remark but she received it without favour. She told me
positively that the best, the nicest men remained boys all their lives.
She was disappointed not to be able to detect anything boyish in her
brother. Very, very sorry. She had not seen him for fifteen years or
thereabouts, except on three or four occasions for a few hours at a
time. No. Not a trace of the boy, he used to be, left in him.

She fell silent for a moment and I mused idly on the boyhood of little
Fyne. I could not imagine what it might have been like. His dominant
trait was clearly the remnant of still earlier days, because I've never
seen such staring solemnity as Fyne's except in a very young baby. But
where was he all that time? Didn't he suffer contamination from the
indolence of Captain Anthony, I inquired. I was told that Mr Fyne was
very little at the cottage at the time. Some colleague of his was
convalescing after a severe illness in a little seaside village in the
neighbourhood and Fyne went off every morning by train to spend the day
with the elderly invalid who had no one to look after him. It was a
very praiseworthy excuse for neglecting his brother-in-law "the son of
the poet, you know," with whom he had nothing in common even in the
remotest degree. If Captain Anthony (Roderick) had been a pedestrian it
would have been sufficient; but he was not. Still, in the afternoon, he
went sometimes for a slow casual stroll, by himself of course, the
children having definitely cold-shouldered him, and his only sister
being busy with that inflammatory book which was to blaze upon the world
a year or more afterwards. It seems however that she was capable of
detaching her eyes from her task now and then, if only for a moment,
because it was from that garret fitted out for a study that one
afternoon she observed her brother and Flora de Barral coming down the
road side by side. They had met somewhere accidentally (which of them
crossed the other's path, as the saying is, I don't know), and were
returning to tea together. She noticed that they appeared to be
conversing without constraint.

"I had the simplicity to be pleased," Mrs Fyne commented with a dry
little laugh. "Pleased for both their sakes." Captain Anthony shook
off his indolence from that day forth, and accompanied Miss Flora
frequently on her morning walks. Mrs Fyne remained pleased. She could
now forget them comfortably and give herself up to the delights of
audacious