"Do you?"
"And I trust you so. There's nobody so kind and thoughtful and strong."
It is pleasant for an unkind, thoughtless weak man to be told such untruths by the woman he loves. And for a few moments I imagined I had the qualities that she had wished upon me, nay, loved upon me. For a few moments there was no kindness, no thoughtfulness, no strength of which I was incapable.
"When your arms are around me I know that nothing can hurt me."
I was holding her in my arms now. But there came in through the hall a pattering of little feet, and by the time Jock and Hurry had burst into the room I was at a garden window looking out, and Lucy had caught up from her work bag that Penelope's web of a silk necktie upon which she so often worked, and made no progress.
"Has Favver come back?"
"Why, no, you little goose. He's gone to Palm Beach. We took him to the train. He won't be back tomorrow, nor the day after. Nor the day after that," and she halted only when she had come to about the tenth tomorrow. "And now make your manners to Mr. Mannering."
In fiction children and dogs have an intuitive aversion for the villain of the piece. But Jock and Hurry had none for me. Indeed they liked me very much and looked to me for treats, and rides round the block, and romping games in which I fled and they pursued. But then it was only since yesterday that I had become a genuine villain. Had their intuition made the discovery? I think I was a little anxious.
But they rushed upon me, and we were to remain for the present at least, so it seemed, the same old friends.
It flashed across my mind that some day in the not far future these children would live under my roof; surely the courts would award them to Lucy; and I highly resolved to be a genuine father to them through thick and thin. Somehow or other they must always be fond of me. Whatever I had to leave when I died they must share equally with any children that I might happen to have of my own. Children? I caught Lucy's eyes. We looked at each other across the tops of those children's heads, and read each other's thoughts. I know this, because when Jock and Hurry had been sent away, I said: "Did you know what I was thinking of just then? I was thinking, wondering, hoping——"