Margaret smiled languidly: "He must have taken a fancy to my little girl."
"But wasn't it funny?" said Laura meditatively; then starting up suddenly in her eagerness: "Mamma, do you know what I thought when he was so kind?"
"No, darling, how can I?"
"I thought"—Laura's eyes were sparkling with excitement—"that perhaps it was papa come back."
Her eager voice roused Margaret from her languor. She rose from her improvised couch among the branches, and resting one hand on the child's shoulder said as quietly as she could, "What brought such an idea into your little head?"
"Why, mamma, don't you see? I always think papa will come like that; he'll want to surprise us and see if we remember him. This gentleman asked me about my papa, and if he lived here. And when I said no, but he was coming back, he looked at me so funnily; then, before he let me go, he kissed me—a big kiss, mamma, like my papa used to give me long ago, when he lived here."
Margaret's heart had been swelling as the little voice flowed on. She could never have told why the childish fancy took such a hold upon her mind, but so it was; with Laura, she could not help feeling that the gentleman took more than a common interest in her. Was it true, then? Had he come back to them? Was her trouble to end? for she did not fear her Maurice; one short half hour, face to face, would be sufficient for them both—sufficient to break the icy barrier that lay between them, and to make them one again.
"Laura," she said, still with that forced quiet in her voice, "try and tell me what the gentleman was like."
This was a difficult task for the little one. She looked up to the sky for inspiration. "He was tall, mamma," she said at last, "and I think—I think there was something funny about his eyes; but he looked kind, and I haven't seen anybody like him before. Of course I don't remember what papa was like. He had a great big dog—so big" (she extended both her arms by way of illustration)—"with a curly black coat and brown eyes, and a tail that wagged so funnily."
The dog was evidently easier to describe than the gentleman. Perhaps Laura was not singular in finding it rather difficult to string together his merits and demerits, even physically considered. He had been a puzzle to more than one in his transit through the world.