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She waited, and I wondered what she could possibly say. She didn’t speak, I could see, the first words that rose to her lips; she repeated what she had said a few minutes before. “Oh of course he’s very clever!” And with this she got up; our two absentees had reappeared.

CHAPTER II

Mrs. Ambient left me and went to meet them; she stopped and had a few words with her husband that I didn’t hear and that ended in her taking the child by the hand and returning with him to the house. Her husband joined me in a moment, looking, I thought, the least bit conscious and constrained, and said that if I would come in with him he would show me my room. In looking back upon these first moments of my visit I find it important to avoid the error of appearing to have at all fully measured his situation from the first or made out the signs of things mastered only afterwards. This later knowledge throws a backward light and makes me forget that, at least on the occasion of my present reference–I mean that first afternoon–Mark Ambient struck me as only enviable. Allowing for this he must yet have failed of much expression as we walked back to the house, though I remember well the answer he made to a remark of mine on his small son.

“That’s an extraordinary little boy of yours. I’ve never seen such a child.”

“Why,” he asked while we went, “do you call him extraordinary?”

“He’s so beautiful, so fascinating. He’s like some perfect little work of art.”

He turned quickly in the passage, grasping my arm. “Oh don’t call him that, or you’ll–you’ll–!”

But in his hesitation he broke off suddenly, laughing at my surprise. Immediately afterwards, however, he added: “You’ll make his little future very difficult.”

I declared that I wouldn’t for the world take any liberties with his little future–it seemed to me to hang by threads of such delicacy. I should only be highly interested in watching it.

“You Americans are very keen,” he commented on this. “You notice more things than we do.”

“Ah if you want visitors who aren’t struck with you,” I cried, “you shouldn’t have asked me down here!”

He showed me my room, a little bower of chintz, with open windows where the light was green, and before he left me said irrelevantly: “As for my small son, you know, we shall probably kill him between us before we’ve done with him!” And he made this assertion as if he really believed it, without any appearance of jest, his fine near- sighted expressive eyes looking straight into mine.

“Do you mean by spoiling him?”

“No, by fighting for him!”

“You had better give him to me to keep for you,” I said. “Let me remove the apple of discord!”

It was my extravagance of course, but he had the air of being perfectly serious. “It would be quite the best thing we could do. I should be all ready to do it.”

“I’m greatly obliged to you for your confidence.”

But he lingered with his hands in his pockets. I felt as if within a few moments I had, morally speaking, taken several steps nearer to him. He looked weary, just as he faced me then, looked preoccupied and as if there were something one might do for him. I was terribly conscious of the limits of my young ability, but I wondered what such a service might be, feeling at bottom nevertheless that the only thing I could do for him was to like him. I suppose he guessed this and was grateful for what was in my mind, since he went on presently: “I haven’t the advantage of being an American, but I also notice a little, and I’ve an idea that”–here he smiled and laid his hand on my shoulder–“even counting out your nationality you’re not destitute of intelligence. I’ve only known you half an hour, but–!” For which again he pulled up. “You’re very young, after all.”