“It gives Nessie enjoyment.”
“Poor Nessie! We shall just plod, plod, along the high roads in a sort of indefinite way, and everything will be ‘nice’ and ‘pretty.’ Nessie is so provokingly good and dear and tiresome and fond of me. Of course I am glad she is fond of me; but I do wish I could shake her up into something different. If only she were like you.”
“Everybody can’t be that, Joan.”
“No, indeed. I wish everybody could. It would be a different sort of world. Not that it isn’t a nice enough world now. I haven’t anything to complain of—anything really to trouble me.”
“If you can say so much, you are better off than most people,” George observed musingly.
“Yes; most people seem to be always wanting something more than they have. But then I have you, and that makes all the difference. I have you, father!”
The black eyes looked up with a suppressed rapture of affection, and a sudden keen pain shot through George Rutherford’s heart, he could not have told why.
“Joan, that is not enough,” he said.
“Not enough to have you? Yes, it is, father dear. I don’t want anything else besides in the world.”
“Or—in heaven?”