“What can possess you to imagine for one moment that I would go without the boy! What is the Orient to me—or my silly fad for Eastern travel! I wish my tongue had been withered before I ever spoke the word!”
“Why, you talk as if I were proposing something amazing—abnormally brutal. Don’t other women leave their children?”
“But with their mothers, or some one who stands in that tender, solicitous relation,—and I have no mother!” Her words ended in a wail.
“But he will be with me—and surely I care for him as much as you do,” he argued, vehemently.
“But why can’t I take him with me,” she sought to adjust the difficulty, “even though the pleasure of the trip is lost if you don’t go?”
“Because—because,” he hesitated. “Because I cannot bear the separation from him,” he declared bluntly. “I am afraid something—I don’t know what—might happen to him. I know I am a fool. I couldn’t bear it.”
His folly went to her heart in his behalf as nothing else could have done. This evidence of his love for the child, his son and hers, atoned for a thousand slights and tyrannies which she forgave on the spot. Her brow cleared, her face relaxed, her cheek flushed.
“Aha!” she cried jubilantly, “you know how it feels, too!” She gleefully shook her fan at him. “We will let the trip to the Orient drop, now and forever. I can’t go without little Edward, and you”—she gave him a radiant, rallying smile—“can’t spare him, so we will just stay at home and see as much of each other as the old lawsuit will let you. And what I want to know,” she added, with a touch of indignation, “is, why do those lawyers of yours allow the matter to harass you? It is their business to take the care of it off your shoulders.”
He stood silent throughout this speech, changing expressions flitting across his face, but it hardened upon the allusion to the lawsuit and his vacillation solidified into resolve.
“Come, Paula, this talk is idle; the matter is arranged. The Hardingtons start for New York to-morrow, and sail as soon as they strike the town. Mrs. Hardington says she will be enchanted to have you of her party, and I have telegraphed and received an answer engaging your stateroom on the ship. Your section in the Pullman is also reserved,—couldn’t get the stateroom on the train—already taken, hang it.”