“But what do you say yourself, Bertie? You have found your mother now. Do you not wish to go to her? You love her very much, I can see. Would you not rather belong to her than stay here to be my little boy?”
Bertie raised his face a little, so that he could look at the Squire. His eyes were full of gravity and a certain fixity of purpose.
“I want to stay with you,” he answered, slowly and steadily. “I do love mother very, very much; but I shall see her every day. She has Uncle Fred now; it is not quite as it used to be when she and I were alone together. She is not lonely now, she is very happy. I am going to be your little boy, and stay with you.”
The Squire bent his head and touched the child’s forehead with his lips.
“You are sure this is your own wish?—you will be content to stay with me?”
“Oh yes,” answered Bertie, quickly; and then, stealing his uninjured arm about the Squire’s neck, he added, with the quaint simplicity that seemed to belong to him, “I feel as if you and I just understood one another. I think we must have been meant for one another when I got washed up here and you adopted me. I don’t think anybody understands you as I do.”
The Squire smiled at these words, yet a suspicious moisture stood upon his eyelashes, as he once more kissed the child in his quiet fashion.
“Yes, my little boy, I think you and I understand one another; and if God has given us to each other, we will try to show our gratitude to Him by loving Him more and more all our lives.”
“I should like that,” answered Bertie, reverently; “because you know it was so kind of Him not to forget me that time when I was quite alone.”
And so, without any more discussion, the matter was settled, and little Ronald Damer was known to be still the Squire’s adopted son, notwithstanding that his mother and her husband were living within a stone’s throw of the Manor House, and that the child was as much at home in one house as in the other. He was still called by the name the Squire had found for him when his own had been buried in oblivion, and it seemed as if he would be always Bertie to those who had known him when he had had no other.