It was half-an-hour before Larrie came back and found the tossed, empty cot. He strode out of the house again, and up the hill in a fury of passion.
Out of the train into which he had seen his friends, Wooster had stepped and gone at quick speed, straight up the road leading to the house. Larrie was not to know it was intended for the last visit of a lifetime. He resisted the inclination to follow and slay him outright, and went home instead—to find Dot had been there and taken away the child.
[p 148]
]A second jealousy sprang up in his heart, jealousy of his own little baby son. He could imagine the pass to which Dot had come, imagine the heart hungerness that had prompted this. But it was all for the child—none of the aching and longing had been for himself. The front door of the house was open, he went straight through the hall and upstairs two steps at a time to the sitting-room.
Dot was sitting rocking alone in the firelight; the little mother had gone to a sudden case of illness in a cottage near, and Wooster had taken her.
The child’s little soft head lay against her breast, she held both its bare little feet in her hand. There were tear-wet places on her cheeks, and the eyes that looked down on the child were full of tenderness, but her lips were rather tightly closed. She could not forget the verandah, and Larrie’s burst of laughter.
He strode across the room.
‘Give me the child,’ he said.
Her arms closed tightly round it.
[p 149]
]‘He is mine, mine,’ she said.
‘Give him to me,’ he cried again.