“Don’t get up, Code,” she said. “You’ve earned your rest more than any man in Freekirk Head to-night. I’m afraid, though, we’re going to make more trouble for you. Ma Schofield wouldn’t let me go anywhere else but here till the Rosan gets back from St. John’s.
“Oh, I hate to think of their coming! They’ll sail around Flag Point and look for the kiddies waving in front of the house. And they won’t even see any house; but, thanks to you, Code, they’ll see the kiddies.”
He knew by the tense, strained tone of her voice that she was very near the breaking-point, and his whole being yearned to comfort her and try to make her happy.
Cursing himself for a lazy dolt, he sprang up and walked over toward her.
“Now, you just let me handle this, Nellie,” he said, “and we’ll soon have Tommie and Mary and Bige all curled up on that sofa like three kittens.”
With a sigh of ineffable relief she resigned the dead weight in her weary arms to him, and he, stepping softly, and holding him gently as a woman, soon had the boy more comfortable than he had been for hours. Mary and Tommie followed, and then Nellie, free of her responsibility at last, bent forward, put her elbows on her knees, and wept.
Code, racked and embarrassed, looked around for his mother, but that mainstay was nowhere in sight. He thought of whistling, so as to appear unconscious of her tears, but concluded that would be merely rude. To take up a paper or book and read it in the face of a woman’s weeping appeared hideous, although for the first time in many months, he felt irresistibly drawn to the ancient and dusty volumes in the glass-doored bookcase.
He compromised by turning his back on the affecting sight, thrusting his hands in his pockets, and 32 studying the remarkably straight line formed by the abrupt junction of the wall and the ceiling.
“Do you mind if I cry, C––Code?” sobbed the girl, apparently realizing their position for the first time.