"Not tell! You ask why we shouldn't tell? Paul, you know that yourself. If he gets to know it--oh, that mother! that Venn!"
She clasped the boy even more tightly; but she had raised her head from his breast. Her face was pale, and her eyes looked quite bewildered as they stared at her husband. "Have you forgotten her?"
Her tremulous voice grew hard. "No, he must never know it. And I swear it and you must promise me it as well, promise it sacredly now, here at his bedside whilst he's sleeping peacefully--and if I should die, not then either, Paul"--her voice grew louder and louder in her excitement, and its hard tone became almost a scream--"we'll never tell him it. And I won't give him up. He's my child alone, our child alone."
Then her voice changed. "Wölfchen, my Wölfchen, surely you'll never leave your mother?"
Her tears began to stream now, and whilst she wept she kissed the child so passionately, so fervently that he awoke. But he did not cry as he generally did when he was disturbed in his sleep.
He smiled and, throwing both his little arms round her neck as she bent down to him, he said, still heavy with sleep, but yet clearly, plainly, "Mammy."
She gave a cry of rapture, of triumphant joy. "Do you hear it? He says 'Mammy.'"
She laughed and cried at the same time in her excessive joy, and caught hold of her husband's hand and held it fast. "Paul--daddy--come, give our child a kiss as well."
And the man also bent down. His wife threw her arm round his neck and drew his head still further down quite close to hers. Then the child laid the one arm round his neck and the other round hers.
They were all three so close to each other in that calm summer night, in which all the stars were gleaming and the moonbeams building silver bridges from the peaceful heavens down to the peaceful earth.