Bulrush shook his head reprovingly. “It’s too long a journey for you to take after your knock-out. You’re not fit to travel yet. I don’t like it a bit. Lydia said this morning it was a crime against yourself, going off like this, and—”
“Lydia?—oh yes, pardonnez-moi, m’sieu’! I did not know her name was Lydia.”
“I didn’t either till after we were engaged.” Crozier stared in blank amazement. “You didn’t know her name till after you were engaged? What did you call her before that?”
“Why, I called her Nurse.” answered the fat lover. “We all called her that, and it sounded comfortable and homelike and good for every day. It had a sort of York-shilling confidence, and your life was in her hands—a first-class you-and-me kind of feeling.”
“Why don’t you stick to it, then?”
“She doesn’t want it. She says it sounds so old, and that I’d be calling her ‘mother’ next.”
“And won’t you?” asked Crozier slyly. “Everything in season,” beamed Jesse, and he shone, and was at once happy and composed. Crozier relapsed into silence, for he was thinking that the lost years had been barren of children. He turned to look at the home they had left. It was some distance away now, but he could see Kitty still at the corner of the house with a small harvest of laundered linen in her hand.
“She made that fresh bed of boughs for me—ah, but I had a good sleep last night!” he added aloud. “I feel fit for the fight before me.” He drew himself up and began to nod here and there to people who greeted him.
In the house behind them at that moment Kitty was saying to her mother, “Where is he going, mother?”
“To Aspen Vale,” was the reply. “If you’d been at breakfast you’d have heard. He’ll be gone two days, perhaps three.”