“Marie says learn you. But of course I’ll say ‘teach’ if you like it better,” with the ready courtesy of a hostess. “You begin with my feet and go backwards!” Again the escaped laughter. The Child was happy.
Down the hall where the slender figure stooped above the delicately written pages the little laugh travelled again and again. By-and-by another laugh, deep and rich, came hand in hand with it. Then the figure straightened tensely, for this new laugh was rarer even than the Child’s. Two years—two years and more since she had heard this one.
“Now it is time to pray me,” the Child said, dropping into sudden solemnity. “Marie lets me kneel to her—” hesitating questioningly. Then: “It’s pleasanter to kneel to somebody—”
“Kneel to me,” he whispered. His face grew a little white, and his hand, when he caressed lightly the frolic-rumpled little head, was not steady. The stone mask of the man dropped off completely, and underneath was tenderness and pain and love.
“Now I lame me down to sleep—no, I want to say another one to-night, Lord God, if Thee please. This is a very particular night, because my father is in it. Bless my father, Lord God, oh, bless my father! This is his day. I’ve loved him all day, and I’m going to again day after to-morrow. But to-morrow I must love my mother. It would be easier to love them both forever and ever, Amen.”
The Child slipped into bed and slept happily, but the man who was father of the Child had new thoughts to think, and it took time. He found he had not thought nearly all of them in his afternoon vigil. On his way back to his lonely study he walked a little slower past the other lonely study. The stooping of the slender figure newly troubled him.
The plan worked satisfactorily to the Child, though there was always the danger of getting the days mixed. The first mother-day had been as “intimate” and delightful as the first father-one. They followed each other intimately and delightfully in a long succession. Marie found her perfunctory services less and less in requisition, and her dazed comprehension of things was divided equally with her self-gratulation. Life in this new and unexpected condition of affairs was easier to Marie.
“I’m having a beautiful time,” the Child one day reported to the Lady, “only sometimes I get a little dizzy trying to remember which is which. My father is which to-day.” And it was at that bedtime, after an unusually active day, that the Child fell asleep at her prayer. Her rumpled head sagged more and more on her delicate neck, till it rested sidewise on the supporting knees, and the Child was asleep.
There was a slight stir in the doorway.
“’Sh! don’t move—sit perfectly still!” came in a whisper as a slender figure moved forward softly into the room.