Meanwhile, they had come to the end of the path, and while Elizabeth straightened some flowers, and made them stand upright within their fence of string, Mary looked at her father, who was pacing up and down, with his hand behind his back and his head bowed in meditation.

Obeying an impulse which sprang from some desire to interrupt this methodical marching, Mary stepped on to the grass walk and put her hand on his arm.
"A flower for your buttonhole, father," she said, presenting a rose.
"Eh, dear ?" said Mr.Datchet, taking the flower, and holding it at an angle which suited his bad eyesight, without pausing in his walk.
"Where does this fellow come from?
One of Elizabeth's roses--I hope you asked her leave.

Elizabeth doesn't like having her roses picked without her leave, and quite right, too." He had a habit, Mary remarked, and she had never noticed it so clearly before, of letting his sentences tail away in a continuous murmur, whereupon he passed into a state of abstraction, presumed by his children to indicate some train of thought too profound for utterance.
"What ?" said Mary, interrupting, for the first time in her life, perhaps, when the murmur ceased.

He made no reply.

She knew very well that he wished to be left alone, but she stuck to his side much as she might have stuck to some sleep-walker, whom she thought it right gradually to awaken.