The baby's godmother sat lost in thought for many minutes. It had cost her much to say what she had said, and she felt doubtful how long the impression she had made would endure. Each heart must pass through the furnace for itself. To hear of the refining of others, has no lasting effect on the heart's own alloy.
She knew this, and her thoughts followed Flower anxiously. At length she rose, and stood leaning her elbow upon the mantelpiece and looking long at an old miniature of the doctor, placed there among Flower's special treasures; but the doctor before Flower knew him, the doctor as he was in years gone by, when he and the baby's godmother were faithful chums, and she was his trusted confidante and the sharer of all his hopes and ambitions. So she stood looking into the bright, dark eyes of a very young man, a man with all the best of life before him, full of a noble courage, an unfaltering faith in his ideals, an intellect which should carry him anywhere he willed to go. A smile of conscious power curved the lips. There was no hint of weariness about the keen, clear eyes.
The baby's godmother took it up and laid it in the palm of her large hand. Then she spoke to it softly. "Oh, Boy!" she said, "oh, Boy! I have done my best for you. I would always have given you all I had to give. But you wanted loveliness and I could only give you love. You have the loveliness and now you are sighing for the love. God send you that, my dear—my dear. Oh, Boy! I have done what I could."
She put the portrait down and turned away as the door opened suddenly to admit the doctor's wife, breathless.
"Jane, such a nuisance! Madame Celestine has arrived. I entirely forgot the appointment. My gown for the next Drawing-room, the final fitting—oh, such a dream! Come up and see, and help and advise. You old darling, what a blessing to have you here! I never can be firm with Celestine."
The luncheon gong had sounded punctually as the clock struck one. The baby's godmother had waited, restlessly, ten minutes, and then received a message not to wait, Mrs. Brand would be down from the workroom shortly.
Tailor-made, booted, and hatted, ready for her journey into Norfolk, Jane helped herself to cold chicken and salad, and kept her eye on the clock, remembering "two sharp."
"If she comes down quite ready she can do it," thought the baby's godmother, and turned her healthy attention to apple-tart and custard.
The door opened and the doctor's wife trailed in, in a teagown.
"Dear Jane, I apologize. But I knew my absence would not impair your appetite, and you should not have left me until that good creature had gone. The restraint of your presence removed, she launched out into fresh suggestions, and wheedled me into having a gown for the Devonshire's big squash, though I had meant to go in my Paquin. How beautifully you carve, my dear, or did old Stoddart do it for you? This fowl looks as if it had been handled by a man and an expert. Now, I fear, I am going to make it look as if it had crossed the road in front of a motor-car. What on earth are you gazing at? 'My pretty Jane, my dearest Jane, oh, never look so shy!'" trilled the doctor's wife. "Is anything wrong with the custard?"