an innocent baby face, and imagined him
growing up slim and tall, to range the woods of Brackenhill in future
years as Lottie herself had wandered in the copses about Fordborough.
And yet sometimes he could not but think of the change that it might
make if little James William Thorne were to die. Horace was very ill,
they said: Brackenhill was shut up, and they had all gone to winter
abroad. The doctors had declared that there was not a chance for him
in England.

At this time Percival kept a sort of rough diary. Here is a leaf from
it: "I am much troubled by a certain little devil who comes as soon as
I am safely in bed and sits on my pillow. He flattens it abominably,
or else I do it myself tossing about in my impatience. He is quite
still for a minute or two, and I try my best to think he isn't there
at all. Then he stoops down and whispers in my ear 'Convulsions!' and
starts up again like india-rubber. I won't listen. I recall some tune
or other: it won't come, and there is a hitch, a horrible blank, in
the midst of which he is down again--I knew he would be--suggesting
'Croup.' I repeat some bit of a poem, but it won't do: what is the
next line? I think of old days with my father, when I knew nothing of
Brackenhill: I try to remember my mother's face. I am getting on very
well, but all at once I become conscious that he has been for
some time murmuring, as to himself, 'Whooping-cough and scarlet
fever--scarlet fever.' I grow fierce, and say, 'I pray God he may
escape them all!' To which he softly replies, 'His grandfather
died--his father is dying--of decline.'

"I roll over to the other side, and encounter him or his twin brother
there. A perfectly silent little devil this time, with a faculty for
calling up pictures. He shows me the office: I see it, I smell it,
with its flaring gaslights and sickly atmosphere. Then he shows me
the long drawing-room at Brackenhill, the quaint old furniture, the
pictures on the walls, the terrace with its balustrade and balls of
mossy stone, and through the windows come odors of jasmine and roses
and far-off fields, while inside there is the sweetness of dried
blossoms and spices in the great china jars. A moment more and it is
Bellevue street, with its rows of hideous whited houses. And then
again it is a river, curving swiftly and grandly between its castled
rocks, or a bridge of many arches in the twilight, and the lights
coming out one by one in the old walled town, and the