id Mr. Knight in a
loud tone, elaborately casual. 'Yes, please,' said Aunt Annie. Mrs.
Knight began to pour out coffee. They all three looked at each other,
joyous, naughty, strategic; and the thing of which they were least
conscious, in that moment of expectancy, was precisely the thing that
the lustrous trifles hidden beneath the basin were meant to signalize:
namely, the passage of years and the approach of age. Mr. Knight's hair
was grey; Mrs. Knight, once a slim bride of twenty-seven, was now a
stout matron of thirty-nine, with a tendency to pant after the most
modest feats of stair-climbing; and Aunt Annie, only the other day a
pretty girl with a head full of what is wrongly called nonsense, was a
spinster--a spinster. Fortunately, they were blind to these obvious
facts. Even Mr. Knight, accustomed as he was to survey fundamental
truths with the detachment of a philosopher, would have been shocked to
learn that his hair was grey. Before the glass, of a morning, he
sometimes remarked, in the tone of a man whose passion for candour
permits him to conceal nothing: 'It's _getting_ grey.'

Then young Henry burst into the room.

It was exactly twelve years since he had been born, a tiny, shapeless,
senseless, helpless, toothless, speechless, useless, feeble, deaf,
myopic creature; and now he was a school-boy, strong, healthy, big, and
clever, who could define a dodecahedron and rattle off the rivers of
Europe like a house on fire. The change amounted to a miracle, and it
was esteemed as such by those who had spent twelve years chiefly in
watching it. One evening, in the very earliest stages, while his mother
was nursing him, his father had come into the darkened chamber, and,
after bending over the infant, had struck a match to ignite a cigar; and
the eyes of the infant had blinked in the sudden light. '_See how he
takes notice!_ the mother had cried in ecstatic wonderment. And from
that moment she, and the other two, had never ceased to marvel, and to
fear. It seemed impossible that this extraordinary fragment of humanity,
which at first could not be safely ignored for a single instant night or
day, should survive the multitudinous perils that surrounded it. But it
did survive, and it became an intelligence. At eighteen months the
intelligence could walk, sit up, and say 'Mum.' These performances were
astounding. And the fact that fifty thousand other babies of eighteen
months in London were similarly walking, sitting