under the rat-eaten thatch.

CHAPTER IX

IN WHICH KATHERINE CALMADY LOOKS ON HER SON

More than a week elapsed before Ormiston was called upon to redeem his
promise. For Lady Calmady's convalescence was slow. An apathy held her,
which was tranquillising rather than tedious. She was glad to lie still
and rest. She found it very soothing to be shut away from the many
obligations of active life for a while; to watch the sunlight, on fair
days, shift from east by south to west, across the warm fragrant room;
to see the changing clouds in the delicate spring sky, and the
slow-dying crimson and violet of the sunset; to hear the sudden hurry
of falling rain, the subdued voices of the women in the adjoining
nursery, and, sometimes, the lusty protestations of her baby when--as
John Knott had put it--"things didn't suit him." She felt a little
jealous of the comely, young wet-nurse, a little desirous to be more
intimately acquainted with this small, new Richard Calmady, on whom all
her hopes for the future were set. But immediately she was very
submissive to the restrictions laid by Denny and the doctor upon her
intercourse with the child. She only stood on the threshold of
motherhood as yet. While the inevitable exhaustion, following on the
excitement of her spring and summer of joy, her autumn of bitter
sorrow, and her winter of hard work, asserted itself now that she had
time and opportunity for rest.

The hangings and coverlet of the great, ebony, half-tester bed were
lined with rose silk, and worked, with many coloured worsteds on a
white ground, in the elaborate Persian pattern so popular among
industrious ladies of leisure in the reign of good Queen Anne. It may
be questioned whether the parable, wrought out with such patience of
innumerable stitches, was closely comprehensible or sympathetic to the
said ladies; since a particularly wide interval, both of philosophy and
practice, would seem to divide the temper of the early eighteenth
century from that of the mystic East. Still the parable was there,
plain to whoso could read it; and not perhaps, rather pathetically,
without its modern application.

The Powers of Evil, in the form of a Leopard, pursue the soul of man,
symbolised by a Hart, through the Forest of This Life. In the midst of
that same forest stands an airy, domed pavilion, in which--if so be it
have strength and fleetness to reach it--the panting, hunted creature
may, for a time, find security a