"Whether or no, we must have him. I see that. I'll do the best I

can to be a mother to him, and we can afford to keep him somehow.

I'll work harder. I wonder when he'll arrive?"

"In the course of a few weeks, I suppose."

"I wish--When shall we have courage to marry, Jude?"

"Whenever you have it, I think I shall. It remains with you

entirely, dear. Only say the word, and it's done."

"Before the boy comes?"

"Certainly."

"It would make a more natural home for him, perhaps," she murmured.

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Jude thereupon wrote in purely formal terms to request that the boy

should be sent on to them as soon as he arrived, making no remark

whatever on the surprising nature of Arabella's information, nor

vouchsafing a single word of opinion on the boy's paternity, nor on

whether, had he known all this, his conduct towards her would have

been quite the same.

In the down-train that was timed to reach Aldbrickham station about

ten o'clock the next evening, a small, pale child's face could

be seen in the gloom of a third-class carriage. He had large,

frightened eyes, and wore a white woollen cravat, over which a

key was suspended round his neck by a piece of common string: the

key attracting attention by its occasional shine in the lamplight.

In the band of his hat his half-ticket was stuck. His eyes

remained mostly fixed on the back of the seat opposite, and never

turned to the window even when a station was reached and called.

On the other seat were two or three passengers, one of them a working

woman who held a basket on her lap, in which was a tabby kitten.

The woman opened the cover now and then, whereupon the kitten would

put out its head, and indulge in playful antics. At these the

fellow-passengers laughed, except the solitary boy bearing the key

and ticket, who, regarding the kitten with his saucer eyes, seemed

mutely to say: "All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly

looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun."

Occasionally at a stoppage the guard would look into the compartment

and say to the boy, "All right, my man. Your box is safe in the

van." The boy would say, "Yes," without animation, would try to

smile, and fail.

He was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that

his real self showed through crevices. A ground-swell from ancient

years of night seemed now and then to lift the child in this his

morning-life, when his face took a back view over some great Atlantic

of Time, and appeared not to care about what it saw.




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