Bobby leaned over with pursed lips. Compton was perspiring. He raised his head, which was enough for Bobby, who gave him a hearty smack resembling in sound the explosion of a mild firecracker.
About eleven o’clock that night Compton tiptoed into the guestroom. The moon’s silvery rays revealed clearly the sleeping lad. How sweet and calm looked the innocent face in the magic light!
“Is there an angel watching over him?” the man asked himself. Twenty-four hours earlier he would have considered it a silly question, but now—
He stooped lower and gazed more intently upon the child’s face. Was that a tear upon the cheek? He felt the pillow. It was wet in places.
“What a brave little chap he is!” he commented. “He’s feeling his separation from his mother dreadfully. But he keeps it to himself.”
Once more Compton gazed. And then for a moment he saw another face—sweet, noble—the face of Bobby’s mother as he had known her in her early teens.
“Ah,” he considered, “she was the sweetest woman that ever came into my life! What a fool I was not to have taken her advice! I left her for the husks of swine.”
Compton bent down, and with trembling lips touched the boy, lightly, reverently on the brow, and with a suppressed sigh turned away to give to sleep the last hour of the most remarkable day of his life.
CHAPTER VIII
BOBBY MEETS AN ENEMY ON THE BOULEVARD AND A FRIEND IN THE LANTRY STUDIO
It was a little after eight of the clock on the following morning that the comedian took his way along the boulevard towards the Lantry studio. Bobby’s eyes were dancing with mischief; the soul of the weather, gay and bland, had entered into him. As he went his way he dispensed lavish smiles to right and left, and poor indeed was he in human feeling who failed to return smile for smile. Many a passer-by craned his neck, having passed Bobby, to take an admiring look at the tiny dispenser of joy who, attired in black broadcloth knickerbockers, a vest of the same material cut away generously from the breast and decked with two shining buttons where it met at the waist, a white shirt foaming into frills, the sleeves of which were held up above the wrists by two bewitching white ribbons, was really rather like to a lily of the field than Solomon clothed in all his glory.