promise.  Nevertheless Mr Glascock thought it might be as well to hurry his departure, and he turned back to say the shortest possible word of farewell to Trevelyan in the garden.  But when he got to the window, Trevelyan was not to be found among the olive trees.  Mr Glascock walked a few steps down the hill, looking for him, but seeing nothing of him, returned to the house.  The elder woman said that her master had not been there, and Mr Glascock started with his charge.  Trevelyan was manifestly mad, and it was impossible to treat him as a sane man would have been treated.  Nevertheless, Mr Glascock felt much compunction in carrying the child away without a final kiss or word of farewell from its father.  But it was not to be so.  He had got into the carriage with the child, having the servant seated opposite to him, for he was moved by some undefinable fear which made him determine to keep the boy close to him, and he had not, therefore, returned to the driver’s seat when Trevelyan appeared standing by the road-side at the bottom of the hill.  ‘Would you take him away from me without one word!’ said Trevelyan bitterly.

‘I went to look for you, but you were gone,’ said Mr Glascock.

’No, sir, I was not gone.  I am here.  It is the last time that I shall ever gladden my eyes with his brightness.  Louey, my love, will you come to your father?’ Louey did not seem to be particularly willing to leave the carriage, but he made no loud objection when Mr Glascock held him up to the open space above the door.  The child had realised the fact that he was to go, and did not believe that his father would stop him now; but he was probably of opinion that the sooner the carriage began to go on the better it would be for him.  Mr Glascock, thinking that his father intended to kiss him over the door, held him by his frock; but the doing of this made Trevelyan very angry.  ’Am I not to be trusted with my own child in my arms?’ said he.  ’Give him to me, sir.  I begin to doubt now whether I am right to deliver him to you.’  Mr Glascock immediately let go his hold of the boy’s frock and leaned back in the carriage.  ‘Louey will tell papa that he loves him before he goes?’ said Trevelyan.  The poor little fellow murmured something, but it did not please his father, who had him in his arms.  ’You are like the rest of them, Louey,’ he said; ’because I cannot laugh and be gay, all my love for you is nothing—­nothing!  You may take him.  He is all that I have, all that I have, and I shall never see him again!’ So saying he handed the child into the carriage, and sat himself down by the side of the road to watch till the vehicle should be out of sight.  As soon as the last speck of it had vanished from his sight, he picked himself up, and dragged his slow footsteps back to the house.

Mr Glascock made sundry attempts to amuse the child, with whom he had to remain all that night at Siena; but his efforts in that line were not very successful.  The boy was brisk enough, and happy, and social by nature; but the events, or rather the want of events of the last few months, had so cowed him, that he could not recover his spirits at the bidding of a stranger.  ‘If I have any of my own,’ said Mr Glascock to himself, ‘I hope they will be of a more cheerful disposition.’