Ah me! we laugh at young mothers, and all the miraculous things they tell us about their babies. They see what we cannot see: the first unfolding of that mysterious flower, the mind.
One day they were out on the lagoon. Dick had been rowing; he had ceased, and was letting the boat drift for a bit. Emmeline was dancing the child on her knee, when it suddenly held out its arms to the oarsman and said:
“Dick!”
The little word, so often heard and easily repeated, was its first word on earth.
A voice that had never spoken in the world before, had spoken; and to hear his name thus mysteriously uttered by a being he has created, is the sweetest and perhaps the saddest thing a man can ever know.
Dick took the child on his knee, and from that moment his love for it was more than his love for Emmeline or anything else on earth.
CHAPTER XV
THE LAGOON OF FIRE
Ever since the tragedy of six years ago there had been forming in the mind of Emmeline Lestrange a something—shall I call it a deep mistrust. She had never been clever; lessons had saddened and wearied her, without making her much the wiser. Yet her mind was of that order into which profound truths come by short cuts. She was intuitive.