ss, Willoughby himself, Rachel's father, Helen's brother-in-law.
As a great deal of flesh would have been needed to make a fat man of
him, his frame being so large, he was not fat; his face was a large
framework too, looking, by the smallness of the features and the glow
in the hollow of the cheek, more fitted to withstand assaults of the
weather than to express sentiments and emotions, or to respond to them
in others.

"It is a great pleasure that you have come," he said, "for both of us."

Rachel murmured in obedience to her father's glance.

"We'll do our best to make you comfortable. And Ridley. We think it
an honour to have charge of him. Pepper'll have some one to contradict
him--which I daren't do. You find this child grown, don't you? A young
woman, eh?"

Still holding Helen's hand he drew his arm round Rachel's shoulder, thus
making them come uncomfortably close, but Helen forbore to look.

"You think she does us credit?" he asked.

"Oh yes," said Helen.

"Because we expect great things of her," he continued, squeezing his
daughter's arm and releasing her. "But about you now." They sat down
side by side on the little sofa. "Did you leave the children well?
They'll be ready for school, I suppose. Do they take after you or
Ambrose? They've got good heads on their shoulders, I'll be bound?"

At this Helen immediately brightened more than she had yet done, and
explained that her son was six and her daughter ten. Everybody said that
her boy was like her and her girl like Ridley. As for brains, they were
quick brats, she thought, and modestly she ventured on a little story
about her son,--how left alone for a minute he had taken the pat of
butter in his fingers, run across the room with it, and put it on
the fire--merely for the fun of the thing, a feeling which she could
understand.

"And you had to show the young rascal that these tricks wouldn't do,
eh?"

"A child of six? I don't think they matter."

"I'm an old-fashioned father."

"Nonsense, Willoughby; Rachel knows better."

Much as Willoughby would doubtless have liked his daughter to praise
him she did not; her eyes were unreflecting as water, her fingers still
toying with the fossilised fish, her mind absent. The elder people went
on to speak of arrangements that could be made for Ridley's comfort--a
table placed where he couldn't help looking at the sea, far from
boilers, at the same time sheltered from the view of people passing.
Unless he