Eliza picked her way among the dusty goods, following the sound of that voice, until she stepped up onto the stone floor of the encircling gallery. This had been cleared of many of its bancas . Several paces away, a massive man squatted upon a black strong-box, all bound about with straps and hasps; but none of them was locked, which she looked on as suggesting it might be empty. The man had a great illustrated story-book open on one of his thighs. Perched on the other was the little blond Indian, who had leaned his head back on the man’s bosom, and drawn up a corner of his breechclout to chew on it. His spindly legs straddled the man’s leg. The moccasins pedaled slow air. He had got a falling look in his eyes, and the lids were unfolding. He glanced up at Eliza when she stepped into his field of view, but presently lost interest, and looked to his dreams. To him the appearance of the strange woman in the court of the house had been diverting, but only for a moment, and alarming, but only until "Papa" told him everything was going to be fine. "Papa," who was Lothar von Hacklheber, kept reading the story—not, Eliza, thought, out of any studied effort to ignore her, but because no parent who knows the rules of the game interrupts a story just when a child has tucked his wings and settled into the long glide to sleep. A pair of gold-rimmed half-glasses perched on Lothar’s cratered nose, and when he reached the end of a page he would lick a finger, turn a page, and glance up at her with mild curiosity. The boy’s lids drooped lower and lower, more and more of the breechclout made its way into his mouth to be sucked on—a sight that produced an ache in Eliza’s breasts as they remembered what it was to let down milk. Presently Lothar shut the book, and glanced around for a place to set it—a gesture that brought Caroline running up to take it from his hand. Tightening a burly arm around the boy’s chest, he leaned back, making of his body a sort of great pillowy couch, and somehow levitated to his feet. He turned his back on the visitors and padded on bare feet through a doorway, then laid the boy into a sort of makeshift Indian-hammock that had been strung diagonally across a disused office. After spreading some blankets over the child, he straightened up, emerged into the gallery, and pulled the door to behind him—leaving it cracked, as Eliza the mother well knew, so that he could hear if the boy cried.