“Oh, you must wait. There, what a shame! and you haven’t kissed baby.”
She ran out to fetch the baby and hold it up to him to be kissed, while she looked at him with all a young mother’s pride in the little one, of which the great sturdy fellow had grown so fond.
“It makes me so happy, Tom,” she said, with the tears in her eyes.
“Happy, does it, lass?”
“Oh, yes. So—so happy,” she cried, nestling to him with her baby in her arms, and sighing with her sense of safety and content, as the strong muscles held her to the broad breast. “I was afraid, Tom, that you might not care for it—that you would think it a trouble, and—and—”
“That you were a silly little wife, and full of foolish fancies,” he cried, kissing her tenderly.
“Yes, yes, Tom, I was,” she cried, smiling up at him through her tears. “But come—your tea. Here, Budge.”
Budge had been a baby herself once—a workhouse baby—and she looked it still, at fourteen. Not a thin starveling, but a sturdy workhouse baby, who had thriven and grown strong on simple oatmeal fare. Budge was stout and rosy, and daily putting on flesh at Tom Morrison’s cottage, where her duty was to “help missus, and nuss the bairn.”
But nearly always in Polly’s sight; for the first baby was too sacred a treasure in that cottage home to be trusted to any hands for long.
She was a good girl, though, was Budge; her two faults prominent being that when she cried she howled—terribly, and that “the way”—to use Tom Morrison’s words—“she punished a quartern loaf was a sight to see.”