Doors were, for the most part, locked, yet there were many days when fires were lit because the house was an old one, and damp Lady Cathcart had a horror of.

Always for young Henry the house wore its buried and abandoned air.  He was never to see it when the human beings in it would count more than its furniture, and the human life in it more than the house itself.  He had come, a year and a half ago, into the very place that his dreams had, from the beginning, built for him.  Those large, high rooms with the shining floors, the hooded furniture, the windows gaping without their curtains, the shadows and broad squares of light, the little whispers and rattles that doors and cupboards gave, the swirl of the wind as it sprang released from corners and crevices, the lisp of some whisper, “I’m coming!  I’m coming!  I’m coming!” that, nevertheless, again and again defeated expectation.  How could he but enjoy the fine field of affection that these provided for him?

His mother watched him with maternal pride.  “He’s that contented!” she would say.  “Any other child would plague your life away, but ’Enery——­”

It was part of Henry’s unusual mind that he wondered at nothing.  He remained in constant expectation, but whatever was to come to him it would not bring surprise with it.  He was in a world where anything might happen.  In all the house his favourite room was the high, thin drawing-room with an old gold mirror at one end of it and a piano muffled in brown holland.  The mirror caught the piano with its peaked inquiring shape, that, in its inflection, looked so much more tremendous and ominous than it did in plain reality.  Through the mirror the piano looked as though it might do anything, and to Henry, who knew nothing about pianos, it was responsible for almost everything that occurred in the house.

The windows of the room gave a fine display of the gardens, the children, the carriages, and the distant houses, but it was when the Square was empty that Henry liked best to gaze down into it, because then the empty house and the empty square prepared themselves together for some tremendous occurrence.  Whenever such an interval of silence struck across the noise and traffic of the day, it seemed that all the world screwed itself up for the next event.  “One—­two—­three.”  But the crisis never came.  The noise returned again, people laughed and shouted, bells rang and motors screamed.  Nevertheless, one day something would surely happen.

The house was full of company, and the boy would, sometimes, have yielded to the Fear that was never far away, had it not been for some one whom he had known from the very beginning of everything, some one who was as real as his mother, some one who was more powerful than anything or any one in the house, and kinder, far, far kinder.