Tom had almost forgotten who the Whitelaw baby was. Not since that Sunday afternoon nearly three years ago had Honey ever mentioned him. The memory having come back, he made an inarticulate sound of impatience, finally snuggling to sleep.
He tried to think of Maisie, to conjure up the rose in her cheeks, the laughter in her eyes; but all he saw, as he drifted into dreams, was the quaint Cambodian face of little Hildred Ansley. Only once did Honey speak again, muttering, as he too fell asleep:
"We'll move."
XXVII
They did not move for the reason that Maisie did. Not for forty-eight hours did Tom learn of her departure. As Mrs. Danker kept not a boarding house but a rooming house, and her guests went days at a time without seeing their landlady, he had no sources of information when Maisie, as she sometimes did, kept herself out of sight. Watching for her on the Monday and the Tuesday following his Sunday night talk with Honey, he thought it strange that she never appeared in the hallway, though he had no cause to be alarmed. He was going to leave Honey, get a job, and be independent. When he had added a little more to his fund in New York, he would propose to Maisie, and marry her if she would take him. He would be eighteen, perhaps nineteen by the time he was able to do this, an early, but not an impossible, age at which to be a husband.
On both these days he had gone to school from force of habit, but on the Wednesday he was surprised by a letter. Though he had never seen Maisie's writing, the postmark said Nashua. Before tearing the envelope he had a premonition of her flight.
A telegram on Monday morning had bidden her come home at once, as her stepmother was dying. She had died. Till her father married again, which she supposed would be soon, she would have to care for the four little brothers and sisters. That was all. On paper Maisie was laconic.
Since his mother's death no revolution in his inner life had upset the boy like this. The Tollivant experience had only left him a little hard and skeptical; that with the Quidmores had passed like the rain and the snow, scarcely affecting him. With Honey his need for affection had always been unfed, and for reasons he could not fathom. Maisie had made the give and take of life easy, natural. She had her limitations, her crude, and sometimes her cruel, insistences; but she liked him. He loved her. He was ready to say it now, because of the blank her loss had hollowed in his life. For the unformed, growing hot-blooded human thing to have nothing on which to spend itself is anguish. Sitting down at his deal table, he wrote to her out of a heart fuller and more passionate than poor Maisie could ever have understood.