Evidently his idea of separation was based on the length of the neighbourhood visits he had made, and he accepted Lloyd's invitation willingly, expecting a speedy return.
"Let's go wite away, Dea'st Fwend," he exclaimed, wriggling down off the bed. "I'll get my hat."
If anything had been needed to complete Lloyd's surrender to the little fellow's charms, it was the sweet way in which he gave her the title "Dearest Friend." That was what his mother had called her, and he thought it was her name. She caught him up and kissed him, despite the jam streaks and the dirt.
"Come on and have yoah face washed and yoah curls brushed, so we'll be all ready when the buggy comes back," she said, hurrying to make him presentable before his mood could change.
As she gathered his clothes together and packed them for the short journey in a dress box which she found under the bed, it made an ache grip her throat to see how Ida had thrown the shield of her mother-love around him in every way possible. There was no mark of poverty here. She had cut up her own clothes, relics of a happier time, to make the little linen suits that were so pretty and becoming. No child in the Valley was better clad, or looked so much like a little aristocrat, as long as she was able to give him her daily attention.
He was so accustomed to being washed and brushed and dressed that he made no objection to what most children of that age consider an unnecessary process, and when Lloyd went about it with unpractised fingers, he gravely corrected her mistakes, and laughed when she made a play of the buttonholes being hungry mouths, that swallowed the buttons in a hurry. Never in her life had she exerted herself so much to be entertaining, for she wanted to take him away without a scene. She wanted, too, for him to look his best, that he might win his own way at The Locusts. She thought with a trifle of uneasiness that her impulsive act might not meet her family's entire approval.
Ida's separation from him was a painful one, for she realized her condition, and knew that it was possible that this might be her last sight of him. As Lloyd turned away with her parting cry ringing in her ears, "Oh, be good to him! Be good to him!" a great tenderness sprang up in her heart for the child who put his hand in hers so trustingly, and trotted away beside her obediently at his mother's bidding. At the cot he stopped to clamber up and kiss the red face, burrowed down in the pillows in a sodden sleep. "My poor farvah's sick too," he explained looking up at her, as if bespeaking sympathy for him also.
Once in the buggy, while they waited for the doctor to unfasten the hitch-rein, he reached up and put his hand on her cheek in his baby fashion to ask her a question. The touch brought the tears to her eyes, it was so confiding, and she was still so shaken by the scene she had just witnessed. In a great throb of tenderness for the helpless little body given over to her care, she drew him closer, with a hasty kiss on the top of his curly head.
"Dea'st Fwend," he said, smiling up at her as if he understood the reason of her sudden caress. Then he cuddled his head against her shoulder in a satisfied way, saying, "Tell me again what the wed and gween bird says."
As they drove in at the entrance gate to The Locusts, Lloyd recalled an experience she had not thought of in years; an autumn day, when only a baby herself, not yet six, she had been left to make her way alone up this same avenue. She had never spent a night away from her mother, and she was to stay a week alone with her grandfather, who did not know how to sing her to sleep and kiss her eye-lids down so she wouldn't be afraid of the black shadows in the corners. Here by this very gate she had stood, assailed by such a great ache of loneliness and homesickness that she was sure she would die if she had to endure it another moment. And there was the spot where, rustling around in the dead leaves, Fritz had found the little gray glove her mother had dropped when she stooped to kiss her good-bye.