The doctor took a step or two away from the table. He was now shaking from head to foot, and when he came back to the silent couple and took a chair between them he made two or three attempts at speech before he could command his voice. “It is very hard on me, Lydia, to—to have you turn from me to a—to a stranger.” His voice had grotesque quavers.
Lydia raised a thin, trembling hand, and laid it on her godfather’s sinewy fingers. She tried to smile into his face. “Dear Godfather,” she said wistfully, “if it were only myself—but the children—”
“What do you mean, Lydia? What do you mean?” he demanded with tremulous indignation.
She dropped her eyes again and drew a long, sighing breath. “I haven’t strength to explain to you all I mean,” she said gently, “and I think you know without my telling you. You have always known what is in my heart.”
“I had thought there was some affection for me in your heart,” said the doctor, thrusting out his lips to keep them from trembling.
Lydia’s drooping position changed slightly. She lifted her hands and folded them together on the table, leaning forward, and bending full on the doctor the somber intensity of her dark, deep-sunken eyes. “Dear Godfather, I have no time or strength to waste.” The slowness with which she chose her words gave them a solemn weight. “I cannot choose. If it hurts you to have me speak truth, you must be hurt. You know what a failure I have made of my life, how I have missed everything worth having—”
Dr. Melton, driven hard by some overmastering emotion, drew back, and threw aside precipitately the tacit understanding he and Lydia had always kept. “Lydia, what are you talking about! You have been more than usually favored—you have been loved and cherished as few women—” His voice died away under Lydia’s honest, tragic eyes.
She went on as though he had not spoken. “My children must know something different. My children must have a chance at the real things. If I die, who can give it to them? Even if I live, shall I be wise enough to give them what I had not wisdom or strength enough to get for myself?”
“You speak as though I were not in the world, Lydia,” the doctor broke in bitterly, “or as though you hated and mistrusted me. Why do you look to a stranger to—”
“Could you do for my children what you have not done for yourself?” she asked him earnestly. “How much would you see of them? How much would you know of them? How much of your time would you be willing to sacrifice to learn patiently the inner lives of two little children? You would be busy all day, like the other people I know, making money for them to dress like other well-to-do children, for them to live in this fine, big house, for them to go to expensive private schools with the children of the people you know socially—for them to be as much as possible like the fatherless child I was.”