Suddenly the Parson launched it in the air again, raising two fingers in
whimsical blessing, then he looked down at Ishmael with a queer
expression in his eyes. That was Ishmael's fate, of which he was as yet
unconscious--no one looked at him absolutely naturally. His mother saw
him with aversion, Archelaus with resentment, and the younger brothers
and the little sister took their cue from their elders. The neighbouring
gentry treated him with an embarrassed kindness when they met him with
Parson Boase, and solved the problem by leaving him alone on other
occasions; the farmers looked at him as though he embodied a huge joke,
and their wives mothered him surreptitiously, giving him saffron-cake,
which he loved, and quick, hard kisses, which he detested. Even Boase
looked at him not only as a child whom he loved, but as the incarnation
of a hope, a theory--in short, as an Experiment. Nevertheless, it was
the Parson to whom Ishmael came with his pleasures, and for all the
intuition which told him the child went to no one in his griefs Boase
had not quite enough of the feminine in him to realise the importance of
the omission.

"Where are you off to, my son?" asked Boase, sticking his hand in the
pocket of his shabby old cassock. He knew better than to pat a boy's
head or thump him between the shoulder-blades with the hearty manner
peculiar to men who have forgotten their own boyhood.

"Oh, I'm just gwain to see if the mill-wheel's workin' down along," said
Ishmael--not for worlds would he have admitted Phoebe Lenine as the
object of his visit. The Parson's eyes twinkled as they rested on the
bouquet.

"Going, not 'gwain,'" he corrected gently.