"But I just came from there. I saw her. She held a child in her arms."
"Ho!" John Denby gave a gesture as if tossing a trivial something aside. "You're dreaming again, Burke. The nursemaid, probably. Your aunt brought one with her. But, see here, son. I was looking for you. Come into my room. I wanted to know—" And he plunged into a subject far removed from nursemaids and their charges.
Burke, however, was not to be so lightly diverted. True, he remained for ten minutes at his father's side, and he listened dutifully to what his father said; but the day was not an hour older before he had sought and found the girl he had seen in the library.
She was not in the library now. She was on the wide veranda, swinging the cherubic boy in the hammock. To Burke she looked even more bewitching than she had before. As a pictured saint, hung about with the aloofness of the intangible and the unreal, she had been beautiful and alluring enough; but now, as a breathing, moving creature treading his own familiar veranda and touching with her white hands his own common hammock, she was bewilderingly enthralling.
Combating again an almost overwhelming desire to stand in awed worship, he advanced hastily, speaking with a diffidence and an incoherence utterly foreign to his usual blithe boyishness.
"Oh, I hope—I didn't, did I? Did I wake—the baby up?"
With a start the girl turned, her blue eyes wide.
"You? Oh, in the library—"
"Yes; an hour ago. I do hope I didn't—wake him up!"
Before the ardent admiration in the young man's eyes, the girl's fell.