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 shook her head. "It will last!" she said; "Nedda's deep."

And if Nedda held, so would Fate; no one would throw Nedda over! They
naturally both felt that. 'Dionysus at the Well,' no less than 'The Last
of the Laborers,' had a light week of it.

Though in a sense relieved at having parted with her secret, Nedda yet
felt that she had committed desecration. Suppose Derek should mind her
people knowing!

On the day that he and Sheila were to come, feeling she could not trust
herself to seem even reasonably calm, she started out, meaning to go
to the South Kensington Museum and wander the time away there; but once
out-of-doors the sky seemed what she wanted, and, turning down the hill
on the north side, she sat down under a gorse bush. Here tramps, coming
in to London, passed the night under the stars; here was a vision,
however dim, of nature. And nature alone could a little soothe her
ecstatic nerves