"Do you want me to go away, then?"
"Want you to go? Certainly not, child," and Mr. Brooke stretched out his hand, and drew her to him with a caressing gesture. "No: I like to have you here. But I thought you wanted to go to her."
"So I do," said Lesley, the tears coming to her eyes. "But—I want to stay, too. I want"—and she put both hands on his arms with a gesture as affectionate as his own—"I want my father and mother both."
"I'm afraid that is an impossible wish."
"But why should it be?" said Lesley, looking up into his face beseechingly.
His features twitched for a moment with unwonted emotion. "You know nothing about it," he said—but he did not speak harshly. "You can't judge of the circumstances. What can I do? Even if I asked her she would not come back to me."
And then he put his daughter gently from him and went down to his study, where he paced up and down the floor for a good half-hour, instead of settling down as usual to his work.
But Lesley's words were not without their effect, although he had put them aside so decidedly. With that young, fair face looking so pleadingly into his own, it did not seem impossible that she should form a new tie between himself and his wife. Of course he had always known that children were conventionally supposed to bind the hearts of husband and wife to each other; but in his own case he had not found that a daughter produced that result. On the contrary, Lesley had been for many years a sort of bone of contention between himself and his wife; and he had retained a cynical sense of the futility of such conventional utterances, which were every day contradicted by barefaced facts.
But now he began to acknowledge that Lesley was drawing his heart closer to his wife. The charm of a family circle began to rise before him. Pleasant, indeed, would it be to find that his dingy old house bore once more the characteristics of a home; that womankind was represented in it by fairer faces and softer voices than the face and voice even of dear old Doctor Sophy, with her advanced theories, her committees, and her brisk disregard of the amenities of life. Yes, he would give a good deal to see Alice—it was long since he had thought of her by that name—established in his drawing-room (which she should refurbish and adorn to her heart's content), with Lesley by her side, and himself at liberty to stroll in and out, to be smiled upon, and—yes, after all, this was his dearest wish—to dare to lavish the love of which his great heart was full upon the wife and child whose loss had been the misfortune of his life.
As he thought of the past years, it seemed to him that they had been very bleak and barren. True, he had done many things; he had influenced many people, and accomplished some good work; but what had he got out of it for himself? He was an Individualist at heart, as most men are, and he felt conscious of a claim which the world had not granted. It was almost a shock to him to feel the egoistic desire for personal happiness stirring strongly within him; the desire had been suppressed for so long, that when it once awoke it surprised him by its vitality.