It was not a boisterous meal. There was not a naturally noisy person there. Bransby was too cold, Stephen too sensitive, Hugh too heavy, to be given to the creation of noise. Mrs. Leavitt thought it bad form, and she was just lowly enough of birth to be tormentedly anxious about good form. And she was inclined to be fat. Helen was ebullient at times, but never noisily so; her voice and her motions, her mirth and her reprovings, were all silvery.

It was a homely hour, and they were all in homely and friendly mood. But it was Stephen who made himself useful. It was Stephen who remembered that Aunt Caroline preferred buttered toast to cream sandwiches, and he carried her the plate on which the toast looked hottest and crispest. And it was Stephen who checked her hand unobtrusively when she came near to putting sugar in Bransby’s tea.

Helen had slipped from her father’s knee—she was a hearty little thing—and motioned Hugh to put one of a nest of tables before the chair she had selected, and dragged close to Richard’s.

“And what have you been doing all afternoon?” he asked Stephen, as the boy brought him the cake.

“Thinking.”

“Story,” Helen said promptly, through a mouthful of cream and cocoanut “You wus just watching the birds.”

“Yes, so I was,” the boy said gently, “and thinking about them.”

“What?” demanded Bransby.

“Thinking how stupid it was to be beaten by birds.”

“Beaten?”

“They fly. We can’t.”

“I see. So you’d like to fly.”

“I’m not sure. I think I might. But I’d jolly well like to be able to.”

The man followed the theme up with the boy. In his stern heart Hugh had already found a warmer place than Stephen had, and Bransby’s kindliness to the brothers was as nothing compared to his love of Helen. But it was—of the three—to Stephen that he talked most often and longest, and with a seriousness he rarely felt or showed in talk with the others. Stephen Pryde interested his uncle keenly. Bransby did not think Hugh interesting, and Helen not especially so—charming (he felt her charm, and knew that others did who lacked a father’s prejudiced predisposition), but not notably interesting as a mentality or even as a character.

She was not an over-talkative child. Bransby suspected that also she was not over-thoughtful. And he was quite right. She felt a great deal: she thought very little. And her small thinkings were neither accurate, searching nor synthetic.

But Stephen thought much and keenly, and the boy talked well, but not too well. Stephen Pryde made few mistakes. When he did he would probably make bad ones. He was not given to small blunders. And such few mistakes as he did make he was gifted with agility to cover up and retrieve finely. Richard enjoyed talking with Stephen.

Helen was not interested in the flight of birds, and still less in its possible application to affairs of mercantile profit, or of national power. She interrupted them at a tense and interesting turn, and neither the man nor the boy resented it.

“What have you been doing?” she demanded of her father.

“Reading ‘David Copperfield’ until Grant came.”

“Is it a nice book?”

“Yes—very.”

“Is it a story book?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll let you read me some, and see if I like it.”

Bransby pointed to the volume, and Stephen brought it to him, still open at the passage he had been reading when his clerk had interrupted him.

“Shall I begin at the beginning?”

“No—I mayn’t like it. Do a bit just where you wus. Wait, till I get back,” and she climbed daintily on to his knee.

And Bransby read, smiling:—“‘“We are young and inexperienced, aunt, I know,” I replied, “and I dare say we say and think a good deal that is rather foolish. But we love one another truly, I am sure. If I thought Dora could ever love anybody else, or cease to love me; or that I could ever love anybody else, or cease to love her; I don’t know what I should do—go out of my mind, I think?” “Ah, Trot!” said my aunt, shaking her head, and smiling gravely, “blind, blind, blind!” “Some one that I know, Trot,” my aunt pursued, after a pause, “though of a very pliant disposition, has an earnestness of affection in him that reminds me of poor Baby. Earnestness is what that Somebody must look for, to sustain him and improve him, Trot. Deep, downright, faithful earnestness.” “If you only knew the earnestness of Dora, aunt!” I cried. “Oh, Trot!” she said again; “blind, blind!” and without knowing why, I felt a vague unhappy loss or want of something overshadow me like a cloud.’”

“Silly man!” exclaimed Helen. She was bored. “No one shouldn’t be blind. I’m not blind—not a bit. I see.”

“You! you’ve eyes in the back of your head,” Hugh said, speaking for the first time in half an hour. In those early days he had a talent for silence. It was by way of being a family gift.

It seems a pity to feel obliged to record it of the one remark of a person who so infrequently made even that much conversational contribution, but Hugh was wrong. Helen was not a particularly observing child. She felt, she dreamed; but she was as lax of observation as she was indolent of thought. Perhaps she realized or sensed this, for she said promptly, “I have not. I see with my front.”

“What do you see now?” her father asked idly.

She pointed to the glowing fire, and sighed dreamily: “I see things, in there. I see Gertrude. Her face is in there all smiley. And she looks sleepy.”

Bransby smiled indulgently and cuddled the pretty head nestling in the crook of his arm.

“David Copperfield” slid to the floor. The opportunity was too good to be neglected—too inviting. The volume was bound in calf, full limp calf, and had all the Cruikshank’s illustrations finely reproduced. Caroline got up very carefully and took up the book. Bransby saw her, but he only smiled indulgently, and she seized the license of his humor, and carried volume xi. to its own space on the shelves.

Encouraged craftily by her amused father, Helen chatted on to her friend Gertrude, and of her. Mrs. Leavitt was shocked, but did not dare show it, and what would have been the use? Nothing! she knew. But she did so disapprove of Richard’s encouraging the child in the habit of telling “stories”—to name very mildly such baseless and brazen fabrications.

Hugh was puzzled, but not unsympathetically so, and less puzzled than might have been expected of so stolid a boy, and at so self-absorbed an age.

Stephen was uneasy and angry. He thrilled somewhat to Helen’s fancy, but he disliked both her claim and his own emotion to it.

All three of these children (for why beat longer about our bush?) in ways totally, almost antagonistically different, were somewhat “psychic.”

No one suspected it, much less knew it—and they themselves least of all. Hugh could not. Stephen would not. Helen was too young.

Psychic science or revelation had not, in those days, had much of a look in socially. And in Oxshott it had barely been heard of—merely heard of enough to give Ignorance a meaningless laugh. Spiritual planes and delicate soul-processes would seem to have little vibration with that environment of mundane interests and financial aggrandizement. But the souls of the other plane peep in through odd nooks, and work in seemingly strange ways. And, too, this one group of people, for all their wealth and their luxuries, lived rather “apart”—they were in the social swim—to an extent, and in the commercial ether up to their necks, but even so, in it, they were in another, and perhaps a more real and significant, way “cloistered” in it: apart.

“Gertrude is sleepy. I am sleepy too. Gertrude says: ‘Good-night, Helen.’ Good-night, Gertrude.”

Bransby swung her up to his shoulder and carried her off to bed. And Hugh, at a gesture of an imperious little hand, gathered up the two dolls, and followed after with them carefully. Helen was a motherly little thing—intermittently, and had her children to sleep with her—sometimes. The chain of flowers lay dying and forgotten.