“For a baby!” cried she. “Cheese! How absurd!”
“But he isn’t a proper, natural baby,” protested Repton, promptly. “Proper babies should drink milk, and when I offered him some he wouldn’t have it.”
“Let me try,” said the lady.
And hugging the child against her breast with one hand, she held a cup of milk-and-water coaxingly to his lips with the other, when behold! he drank eagerly and peacefully, to the admiration of everybody.
“He’s an artful little cuss,” said Repton. “He must have guessed there was an angel—I mean a lady—in the house as soon as he came inside the door, and made up his mind to get her attentions all to himself or perish in the attempt.”
The lady laughed again, but so low, so sweetly, that an answering smile appeared on the face of the child, whom she was now feeding with small morsels of bread-and-butter, with which she had silently beckoned Southerley to supply her.
“It’s his own fault if he’s hungry,” said Southerley, earnestly. “I myself bought him a Banbury cake and a cold sausage on the journey and he wouldn’t have either of them, except as weapons of offence.”
“It’s lucky he knew what was good for him better than you did!” said the lady.
“What would his mother say if she knew you’d tried to feed him with cold sausage?” cried Repton, regaining all his fancied superiority in the matter of infant management now that they no longer had the infant to manage.
The lady was still looking down upon the boy, who was as happy and good again as a child could be.