"You needn't be afraid," he said. "I'll treat him tenderly for your sake."
I was too confused to speak, and I could only sit there dazed and silent while he went away. It was not what he was saying that filled me with a tumult till my thoughts seemed beating in my head like wild birds in a net. Suddenly while he was speaking, while his dear, honest eyes full of pain were looking into mine, the still, small voice had spoken, and I knew that I cared for Tom as he cared for me.
November 8. I realize now that from the morning when Tom and I first stood with baby in my arms between us I have felt differently toward him. It was at the moment almost as if I were his wife, and though I never owned it to myself, even in my most secret thought, I have somehow belonged to him ever since. I see now that something very deep within has known and has from time to time tried to tell me; but I put my hands to the ears of my mind. Miss Fleming used to try to teach us things at school about the difference between the consciousness and the will, and other dark mysteries which to me were, and are, and always will be utterly incomprehensible, and I suppose some kind of a consciousness knew what the will wouldn't recognize. That sounds like nonsense now it is on paper, but it seemed extremely wise when I began to write it. No matter; the facts I know well enough. It is wonderful how a woman will hide a thing from herself, a thing she knows really, but keeps from being conscious she knows by refusing to let her thoughts put it into words.
To myself I seem shamefully fickle,—and yet it seems also as if I had never changed at all, but that it was always Tom I have been fond of, even when I fully believed it was George. Of course this is only a weak excuse; but at least I have been fond of Tom as a friend from my childhood. He has always commanded me, too, in a way. He has done what I wished and what I thought best; but I have always known he could be influenced only so far, and that if I wanted what he did not believe in he could be as stubborn as a rock. The hardness of his mother shows itself in him as the stanch foundation for the gentleness he gets from his father.
Miss Charlotte came in for a moment to-day, and by instinct she knew that something had made me happy. She was full of sympathy for a moment, and then, I think, some suspicion came into her dear old head which she would not have there.
"Ruth, my dear," she said in her rough way, "you look too cheerful for the head of a foundling asylum and a house of refuge. I hope you've made George Weston promise to marry his own wife,—though if I made the laws it wouldn't be necessary for a man to marry a woman more than once. I've no idea of weddings that have to come round once in so often like house-cleaning."
She was watching me so keenly as she spoke that I smiled in spite of myself.
"No," I told her, "I haven't been able to make him; but Tom Webbe has undertaken to bring him round, so I believe it will be all right."
Whether she understood or not I cannot tell, but from the loving way in which she leaned over and kissed me I suspect she had some inkling of it.