“What do you mean?”
Charlot, whose presence had thus far been forgotten by them both, had remained hanging to his mother’s skirts, struggling bravely to keep down his rising sobs as the altercation waxed more warm. Goliah, leaving his chair, approached the group.
“You’re my boy, aren’t you? You’re a good little Prussian. Come along with me.”
But before he could lay hands on the child Silvine, all a-quiver with excitement, had thrown her arms about it and clasped it to her bosom.
“He, a Prussian, never! He’s French, was born in France!”
“You say he’s French! Look at him, and look at me; he’s my very image. Can you say he resembles you in any one of his features?”
She turned her eyes on the big, strapping lothario, with his curling hair and beard and his broad, pink face, in which the great blue eyes gleamed like globes of polished porcelain; and it was only too true, the little one had the same yellow thatch, the same rounded cheeks, the same light eyes; every feature of the hated race was reproduced faithfully in him. A tress of her jet black hair that had escaped from its confinement and wandered down upon her shoulder in the agitation of the moment showed her how little there was in common between the child and her.
“I bore him; he is mine!” she screamed in fury. “He’s French, and will grow up to be a Frenchman, knowing no word of your dirty German language; and some day he shall go and help to kill the whole pack of you, to avenge those whom you have murdered!”
Charlot, tightening his clasp about her neck, began to cry, shrieking:
“Mammy, mammy, I’m ’fraid! take me away!”