For Philip, of course. Ten o'clock had just chimed from a church-tower close by, and the time between that and the half-hour had belonged for years to her best friend. Sometimes during those short thirty minutes of a busy day she wrote to him; sometimes, as now, she stood watching for him with tolerable certainty that, if steamers and trains were punctual, he would step with bodily presence into her life for a few weeks; but most often she was setting time, and space, and absence, and all the trivialities which clip the wings of poor humanity at defiance. In other words she was allowing her imagination to get the better of her common sense. That is one way of putting it. Another is possible to those who, like Belle, have learnt to recognise the fact that the outside world exists for each one of us, not in itself, but in the effect which it produces on our consciousness. Two women are grinding at the mill; the one weeps over the task, the other smiles; just as they choose to weep or smile. The secret of the emotion lies not in the cosmic touch itself, but in the way the consciousness receives it, and in the picture which the imagination draws of our own condition; the abstract truth, the actual reality affects us not at all. So Belle Raby, as she looked out to the wild roses in the hedgerow and the yellow butterflies fluttering over the grey bloom of the flowering grasses, saw nothing of the placid English landscape spread before her eyes. She was standing on a faraway Indian platform where the crows sat on the railings cawing irrelatively, and a tall man in undress uniform was listening to those first words,--"it is father." That had been the beginning of it all; the keynote both of the discords and harmony of the whole. Then suddenly, as irrelatively perhaps as the cawing of the crows, the scene changed. The flood of sunshine faded to mirk and fog; such mirk and fog as humanity and its ways creates in London on a dull November day. An atmosphere of civilisation and culture, say some. Perhaps; but if so, civilisation with all its advantages is apt to smell nasty. She saw a man and a woman standing opposite each other in a London lodging, in a London fog. But five minutes before Philip had come into it buoyantly, decisively, bringing with him a memory of sunshine and purer air. Now he stood with his back to the grey square of the window, his hands stretched out to her in something between command and entreaty. "Belle! put down the child and let me speak to you." And then for the first time, she had gone over to him, with the child still in her arms, and kissed him. "Jack will not trouble me, dear," she said; "he is such a quiet wee mite. Come, let us sit down and talk it over."