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"You seem to know," he said, amused and curious

"I know Major Belwether told ht of Howard as an anchor for her It seeative inertia … I said I'd do it I did And now I don't knoish, aled your ideas?"

"I don't knoard is safer than Stephen Siward, already in the first clutches of his master-vice Would you mate what she inherits from her mother and her e from the Siwards?"

"After all," observed Ferrall dryly, "we're not in the angel-breeding business"

"We ought to be Every decent person ought to be If they were, inherited vice would be as rare in this country as smallpox!"

"People don't inherit smallpox, dear"

"Never mind! You knohat I mean In our stock farms and kennels, eed out, destroy, exterreatest attention to the production of all offspring except our own Look at Stephen! How dared his parents bring him into the world? Look at Sylvia! And now, suppose they marry!"

"Dearest," said Ferrall, " like five toy tops Your theories are all right; but unless you and I are prepared to abandon several business enterprises and take to the lecture platforh to marry whom they like, and the human race will he run as usual with money the favourite, and love a case of 'also-ran' … By the way, how dared youfrown on Mrs Ferrall's brow faded; she raised her clear grey eyes and ay, hu the colour into her pretty face

"You know I'ht, Kemp"

"Always, dear And now that we have the world off our hands for a few allop?"

But she held her horse to a walk, riding forward, grave, thoughtful, preoccupied with a new probleht she had been awakened in her bed to find standing beside her a white, wide-eyed figure, shivering, li lace She had taken the pallid visitor to her arms and war the thousand little words and sounds, the breathing ic mothers use with children And Sylvia lay there, chilled, nerveless, silent, ignorant why her sleeplessness had turned to restlessness, to loneliness, to an awakening perception of what she lacked and needed and began to desire For that sad void, peopled at intervals through her brief years with a vague mother-phantom, had, in the new crisis of her career, beco her with her own utter isolation Fill it now she could not, now that she needed that ghost of child-coe, that sweet shape she had fashioned out of dreams to symbolise a mother she had never known