But during this final performance, Nature suddenly held out her leaden sceptre over the youthful eyelids. “I is not eepy,” whined he very faintly, and succumbed.
Clement laid down his psaltery softly and began to rock his new treasure in his arms, and to crone over him a little lullaby well known in Tergou, with which his own mother had often sent him off.
And the child sank into a profound sleep upon his arm. And he stopped croning and gazed on him with infinite tenderness, yet sadness; for at that moment he could not help thinking what might have been but for a piece of paper with a lie in it.
He sighed deeply.
The next moment the moonlight burst into his cell, and with it, and in it, and almost as swift as it, Margaret Brandt was down at his knee with a timorous hand upon his shoulder.
“GERARD, YOU DO NOT REJECT US, YOU CANNOT.”
(1) More than one hermit had received a present of this
kind.
(2) Query, “looking glass.”
(3) Craft. He means trade or profession.
CHAPTER XCV
The startled hermit glared from his nurseling to Margaret, and from her to him, in amazement, equalled only by his agitation at her so unexpected return. The child lay asleep on his left arm, and she was at his right knee; no longer the pale, scared, panting girl he had overpowered so easily an hour or two ago, but an imperial beauty, with blushing cheeks and sparkling eyes, and lips sweetly parted in triumph, and her whole face radiant with a look he could not quite read; for he had never yet seen it on her: maternal pride.