it was, his invincible habit of over-sensitive gloom robbed him of the
detachment which is the most truly enviable of all the gifts of the
gods. He was a little man, beautifully made, with the high nose, the
tossed-back hair, the piercing look of the man at once prejudiced and
nervous. He lived wrapt in himself, and saw in his daughter more his own
hope in old age than a creature wonderful in her youth and vitality for
her own ends. When the crude heartlessness of the boys racked him or
the well-meaning advances of the gentry offended his alert vanity, it
was to Hilaria that he would turn in thoughts and words to attain that
measure of approbation without which his own self-love would have
languished of inanition. It was Hilaria who healed his hurts, though
with increasing difficulty. For there is little gulf, and that easily
bridged, between the very young child and the old man, but between the
adolescent and the old it is wide and deep. And she was eager where he
was retiring, confident where he was suspicious. With what of pity,
lovely but half-patronising too, did she solace him!... Between them lay
the gulf not only of a generation but of a different habit of thought,
of alien tastes, which not all his passionate clutching or her impatient
tenderness could bridge for more than a few moments of clinging together
against the world. None of this did he realise, neither did Hilaria, so
they were spared much unhappiness, merely fretting blindly without
knowing why.

Hilaria was not a beauty, though she would be considered more nearly so
now than then, when a high forehead and well-sleeked hair were almost
necessities of life. Her low brow--truly Greek in its straightness and
the crisp ripple of her hair around it--was not in favour at that time.
The hair, which was of a dull ashen brown, was strained back tightly and
confined by a round comb. Her eyebrows, too straight for the period and
too thick, nearly met above the short, tip-tilted nose, freckled as a