“Come,” she said—“she is fast asleep.”
She led him to a small bed. She bent over it to turn down the blankets and sheets and tucked the little one away, her red-brown hair falling about the sleeping child.
He knelt down by the little white cot, a strange singing at his heart, his limbs all a-tremble, and, putting out his hand, touched the tiny hand of the sleeping child, who opened small warm fingers and clasped his thumb.
His eyes watched the little one hungrily.
Betty sat down sideways on the cot and gazed at them.
“I wonder what you think of her, Noll,” she said.
“She is very beautiful,” he said.
Betty laughed gently:
“You wouldn’t think it, Noll; but she has her faults,” she said. “It’s no use disguising these things, you are bound to discover them—she is self-willed, tyrannical, unscrupulous—ah, how she tramples one’s heart under her woolly little shoes!—she is greedy, frets under opposition, is ridiculously conceited about her mother, I am afraid will be as arrogant about her father as he is about himself, and altogether displays a lack of modesty and of ladylike reserve that causes me the gravest anxiety about her moral attributes.... You would never be able to disown her, Noll—she has all your vices.”
Noll smiled as the tears trickled down his face: