d first at him, and then at the child between them,
and wondered at the blundering alchemy of Nature...

With the exception of the little girl herself, everything connected with
that time had grown curiously remote and unimportant. The days that had
moved so slowly as they passed seemed now to have plunged down head-long
steeps of time; and as she sat in the autumn sun, with Darrow's letter
in her hand, the history of Anna Leath appeared to its heroine like some
grey shadowy tale that she might have read in an old book, one night as
she was falling asleep...

X

Two brown blurs emerging from the farther end of the wood-vista
gradually defined themselves as her step-son and an attendant
game-keeper. They grew slowly upon the bluish background, with
occasional delays and re-effacements, and she sat still, waiting till
they should reach the gate at the end of the drive, where the keeper
would turn off to his cottage and Owen continue on to the house.

She watched his approach with a smile. From the first days of her
marriage she had been drawn to the boy, but it was not until after
Effie's birth that she had really begun to know him. The eager
observation of her own child had shown her how much she had still to
learn about the slight fair boy whom the holidays periodically restored
to Givre. Owen, even then, both physically and morally, furnished her
with the oddest of commentaries on his father's mien and mind. He would
never, the family sighingly recognized, be nearly as handsome as Mr.
Leath; but his rather charmingly unbalanced face, with its brooding
forehead and petulant boyish smile, suggested to Anna what his father's
countenance might have been could one have pictured its neat features
disordered by a rattling breeze. She even pushed the analogy farther,
and descried in her step-son's mind a quaintly-twisted reflection of
her husband's. With his bursts of door-slamming activity, his fits of
bookish indolence, his crude revolutionary dogmatizing and his flashes
of precocious irony, the boy was not unlike a boisterous embodiment of
his father's theories. It was as though Fraser Leath's ideas, accustomed
to hang like marionettes on their pegs, should suddenly come down
and walk. There were moments, indeed, when Owen's humours must have
suggested to his progenitor the gambols of an infant Frankenstein; but
to Anna they were the voice of her secret rebellions, and her tenderness
to her step-son was partly b