She pressed his hands eagerly, a divine yearning, a gleam of passionate hope shone in her dark eyes. Fenton tried to smile, but despite himself his lip trembled. He had hard work to control himself, but he reflected that with him lay the responsibility of dissuading Ninitta from her mad project.
"But it will be better still," he urged, "to be with him. What can a boy do without his mother?"
She bent her head forward, gazing into his eyes as if she were trying to read his very soul; then she threw it backward with a sharp moan, shaking his hands from hers with a tragic gesture.
"He would be ashamed," she said. "Now he is too young to know that he is better without his mother."
She looked around the familiar studio with a sweeping, panting glance; then she turned again to Fenton, clasping both his hands with one of hers.
"Think of what I have done for you," she said; "and write me about him.
I shall die if you do not."
And there shot through Fenton's mind a sense of the terrible tragedy which lay in such an appeal for such an end.
When she was gone, Fenton consoled himself with the reflection that the lack of money would prevent Ninitta from carrying out her wild whim. He, of course, could not know that soon after Nino's birth Herman had started a fund for him in a savings bank, and to the mother's intense gratification had the deposits made in her name as trustee. He had taught Ninitta to sign her name; and great had been her pleasure in watching the little fund grow. It indicated the desperateness of her resolve, that now she broke into this cherished fund, drawing barely enough money to take her back to Capri. She was going away for Nino's sake she argued with herself, and that justified even this.
All through the day she busied herself with preparations for departure. She would take nothing but the barest necessities; only that the hand-satchel into which she compressed her few belongings held Nino's first baby socks, a lock of his hair, his picture, a broken toy, and other dear trifles, each of which she packed wet with tears and covered with kisses.
Late in the afternoon she took Nino into her chamber alone to bid him good-by. Her limbs failed her as the door closed and he stood looking at her in innocent wonder. She sank into a chair, faint and trembling, soul and body rent with an intolerable anguish so great that for a moment she wondered if she were not dying.