After their coffee before the open fire—she herself had had “cambric” coffee—Peter smoked his cigar, while she curled up in silence in the twin to his big cushioned chair and sampled her chocolates. The blue flames skimmed the bed of black coals, and finally settled steadily at work on them nibbling and sputtering until the whole grate was like a basket full of molten light, glowing and golden as the hot sun when it sinks into the sea. 106
Except to offer her the ring about his slender Panatela, and to ask her if she were happy, Peter did not speak until he had deliberately crushed out the last spark from his stub and thrown it into the fire. The ceremony over, he held out his arms to her and she slipped into them as if that moment were the one she had been waiting for ever since the white morning looked into the window of the lavender dressing-room on Morningside Heights, and found her awake and quite cold with the excitement of thinking of what the day was to bring forth.
“Eleanor,” Peter said, when he was sure she was comfortably arranged with her head on his shoulder, “Eleanor, I want you to feel at home while you are here, really at home, as if you hadn’t any other home, and you and I belonged to each other. I’m almost too young to be your father, but—”
“Oh! are you?” Eleanor asked fervently, as he paused.
“—But I can come pretty near feeling like a father to you if it’s a father you want. I lost my own father when I was a little older than you are now, but I had my dear mother and sister 107 left, and so I don’t know what it’s like to be all alone in the world, and I can’t always understand exactly how you feel, but you must always remember that I want to understand and that I will understand if you tell me. Will you remember that, Eleanor?”
“Yes, Uncle Peter,” she said soberly; then perhaps for the first time since her babyhood she volunteered a caress that was not purely maternal in its nature. She put up a shy hand to the cheek so close to her own and patted it earnestly. “Of course I’ve got my grandfather and grandmother,” she argued, “but they’re very old, and not very affectionate, either. Then I have all these new aunts and uncles pretending,” she was penetrating to the core of the matter, Peter realized, “that they’re just as good as parents. Of course, they’re just as good as they can be and they take so much trouble that it mortifies me, but it isn’t just the same thing, Uncle Peter!”
“I know,” Peter said, “I know, dear, but you must remember we mean well.”
“I don’t mean you; it isn’t you that I think of when I think about my co—co-woperative parents, and it isn’t any of them specially,—it’s just the 108 idea of—of visiting around, and being laughed at, and not really belonging to anybody.”
Peter’s arms tightened about her.
“Oh! but you do belong, you do belong. You belong to me, Eleanor.”