She was in a tumult of feeling. It was seldom that she had shown emotion in the past two years, and it was the more ample when it did break forth. But she dried her eyes, and together they went to the nursery. She dismissed the nurse and they were left alone by the sleeping child. She knelt at the head of the little cot, and touched the child’s forehead with her lips. He stooped down also beside it.
“He’s a grand little fellow,” he said. “Lali,” he continued presently, “it is time Frank came home. I am going to write for him. If he does not come at once, I shall go and fetch him.”
“Never! never!” Her eyes flashed angrily. “Promise that you will not. Let him come when he is ready.
“He does not, care.” She shuddered a little.
“But he will care when he comes, and you—you care for him, Lali?”
Again she shuddered, and a whiteness ran under the hot excitement of her cheeks. She said nothing, but looked up at him, then dropped her face in her hands.
“You do care for him, Lali,” he said earnestly, almost solemnly, his lips twitching slightly. “You must care for him; it is his right; and he will—I swear to you I know he will—care for you.”
In his own mind there was another thought, a hard, strange thought; and it had to do with the possibility of his brother not caring for this wife.
Still she did not speak.
“To a good woman, with a good husband,” he continued, “there is no one—there should be no one—like the father of her child. And no woman ever loved her child more than you do yours.” He knew that this was special pleading.