, like a breaking twig, it
dropped him to bathos.

"But--but--" Dicky passed a hand over his face--"Miss Quiney said that
Oliver Cromwell was covered with warts!"

Captain Vyell laughed outright.

"Women have wonderful ways of conveying a prejudice. Warts? Well,
there, at any rate, we have the advantage of old Noll." The Collector,
whose sense of hearing was acute and fastidious, broke off with a sharp
arching of the eyebrows and a glance up at the ceiling, or rather (since
ceiling there was none) at the oaken beams which supported the floor
overhead. "Manasseh," he said quickly, "be good enough to step upstairs
and inform our landlady that the pitch of her voice annoys me. She
would seem to be rating a servant girl above."

"Yes, sah."

"Pray desire her to take the girl away and scold her elsewhere."

Manasseh disappeared, and returned two minutes later to report that
"the woman would give no furdah trouble." He removed the white cloth,
set out the decanters with an apology for the mahogany's indifferent
polish, and withdrew again to prepare his master's coffee.

At once a silence fell between father and son. Dicky had expected to
hear more of Oliver Cromwell. He stared across the dull shine of the
table at his parent's coat of peach-coloured velvet and shirt front of
frilled linen; at the lace ruffle on the wrist, the signet ring on the
little finger, the hand--firm, but fine--as it reached for a decanter or
fell to playing with a gold toothpick. He loved this father of his with
the helpless, concentred love of a motherless child; admired him, as all
must admire, only more loyally. To feel constraint in so magnificent a
presence was but natural.

It would have astonished him to learn that his father, lolling there so
easily and toying with a toothpick, shared that constraint. Yet it was
so. Captain Vyell did not understand children. Least of all did he
understand this son of his begetting. He could be kind to him, even
extravagantly, by fits and starts; desired to be kind constantly; could
rally and chat with him in hearing of a third person, though that third
person were but a servant waiting at table. But to sit alone facing the
boy and converse with him was a harder business, and gave him an absurd
feeling of _gene_; and this (though possibly he did not know it) was the
real reason why, having brought Dicky in the coach for a treat, he
himself had ridden all day in saddle.

Dicky was the f