Two arms went around the young man’s neck and a lovely face looked up at him. “Please, please,” she begged. “It isn’t as if there would be anything dreadful to find out.”
“No,—it’s just that I—well, I’m no proof against you, as you well know! All right. I promise. I will never tell her.”
“Now you have made me perfectly happy,—as you always do. This is the prettiest doll that I ever had to play with, and I’m going to bring her up very carefully.”
“I see that she has my hair,” teasingly continued the young man, “what there is of it. What color are her eyes? I’ve never seen her awake but once and then she was howling and her eyes were screwed shut.”
“Her eyes are going to be exactly like mine. Auntie says that in all important features she is precisely like all the prettiest babies of our family!”
The two young people happily looked at each other and laughed, still softly; but the baby parted its long, dark lashes a little, turned its head, waved a tiny hand for a moment, and with a faint sigh put its thumb in its mouth, falling soundly asleep again as it did so.
Silently the two, who stood by the crib with its white blankets and dainty coverlid, waited to see if the child would waken. Then gently the young woman drew the baby hand away from the rosebud mouth. With a new dignity she said, “You have to do that whenever babies start to put their thumbs in their mouths.”
But this was back in the late autumn some seventeen years before the next recorded scene.
CHAPTER II.
SHIRLEY EMBARKS UPON NEW ADVENTURES.
“Of course I don’t care, Mother! Why shouldn’t you and Dad go off and have the time of your lives? It is simply great! Hurrah for the Trustees and Faculty! It is time that Dad had his ‘sabbatical year,’ or whatever you call it. With all that he has done for this university!”