But Nixie intervened in her stately fashion, leaning over a little and stroking the scar with fingers that were like the touch of leaves.
‘Uncle Paul’s tired after coming such a long way,’ she said gravely with sympathy. ‘He hasn’t even unpacked his luggage yet, have you, Uncle?’
Paul admitted that this was the case. He made the least possible motion to push them off and clear a space round his chair.
‘Are you tired? Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said Jonah.
‘Then he ought to see the animals at once,’ decided Toby, ‘before they go to bed,’—she seemed to have a vague idea that the whole world must go to bed earlier than usual if Uncle Paul was tired—‘or they’ll be awfully disappointed.’ Her face expressed the disappointment of the animals as well as her own; her uncle’s fatigue had already taken a second place. ‘Oughtn’t he?’ she added, turning to the others.
Paul remembered his intention to remain stiffly grown up.
He made a great effort. Oh, but why did they tug and tear at his heart so, these little fatherless children? And why did he feel at once that he was in their own world, comfortably ‘at home’ in it? Did this world of children, then, link on so easily and naturally with the poet’s region of imagination and wonder in which he himself still dwelt for all his many years, bringing him close to his main passion—to know Reality?
‘Of course, I’ll come and say good-night to them before they turn in,’ he decided kindly, letting Nixie and Toby take his hands, while Jonah followed in the rear to show that he considered this a girl’s affair yet did not wholly disapprove.
‘Hadn’t we better tell your mother where we’re going?’ he asked as they started.
‘Oh, mother won’t mind,’ came the answer in chorus. ‘She hardly ever comes up to the nursery, and, besides, she doesn’t care for the animals, you see.’