A pang of joy and triumph shot through Westenra, but it was mingled with something that cut like a knife on an open wound. Val was staring before her sightlessly. Yet a little smile played round her lips--a smile of some feeling Westenra hardly understood. There was something infinite in it, yet terribly human.
"You would rather go back to America than stay with me, Brannie?"
It was not pleading, nor sad, nor coaxing. Just a little simple question. Only she and Westenra knew how much hung on it, though one of the others had a very good notion of what was behind. Bran looked across at his mother hesitatingly. She had always trained him to truth and directness, yet he searched her face for a moment as if for a clue. Bran hated to hurt any one's feelings--most of all his mother's. But she smiled on, and he could read nothing. He had never seen her eyes so empty before, and could not know by what great effort she had emptied them of all the fierce love and terror in her heart, so as to play fair, and not bias the issue. So after a little moment Bran said:
"I like daddy. He's got a hard smell--like steel. I don't want to be away from him any more." He slid an arm round his father's neck. No one looked at Val. Suddenly and amazingly Haidee cried out in a fury of indignation:
"You are a little pig, Bran! ... an ungrateful little pig!"
She burst out crying, and jumping up ran to the house. Bran's eyes slowly filled with tears.
"Haidee is nasty!" he said in a trembling voice. "What have I done?" In his trouble he turned naturally to his mother and the tenderness that had never failed him.
"Nothing, my Wing. Haidee will be all right by and by. Here is Marietta with the tea."
But Westenra would not take tea. He appeared to stiffen at the sight of it. After Bran had swallowed a hurried goûter, as the French call it, his father took him by the hand and they went away together for a walk by the sea. When they came back at seven, Westenra excused himself, and returned to the hotel with a promise to call after dinner.
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