CHAPTER XXVII
MUCH TO TALK ABOUT
More than three years and a half! Can you imagine what such separation means to two people who love each other?
We read much, and hear much, about the strength of "mother-love." It is the most holy expression of the Creative Instinct—none doubt it.
Yet there is an emotion even deeper and wider than the affection of the mother for the child she has borne. Because through all these eras of advancing civilization man, the father, has shouldered the responsibility of caring for and protecting both the mother and the child.
Not enough thought is given to this. Father-love is often greater, more self-sacrificing, more noble than that given the offspring by the maternal parent. In this the mother follows instinct; she shares it with the female of all species.
When the child must depend upon the father for all—deprived of maternal parentage as was this girl, Janice Day—there is a bond between father and child that no other mortal tie can equal.
Never had this man gone to his couch at night without a thought of the daughter he had left in the North—growing from a child to womanhood out of his sight. Nor had Janice Day with all her manifold interests forgotten for one single day her father and his lonely existence in Mexico.
Janice went into her father's arms and clung to him without speech—not intelligible speech at least. Yet there were words wrenched from both of them—little intimate words of passionate endearment like nothing Marty Day had ever heard before. Marty, steeled by the New England belief that the giving away to emotion, especially that of affection, was almost indecent, actually blushed for his relatives. Finally he drawled:
"Hi tunket! Give a feller a chance, will you, Janice? What d'you think, that I came clear down into Mexico here to play a dummy hand?"
"You're Marty!" cried Mr. Day, putting out his hand to his nephew.