"Oh, no, certainly not," I answered hastily. "We'll find a better way than that. Now," I added, "be a good girl, dry your eyes; run along and don't say a word about—our conversation."
"No, sir," she murmured obediently. And still gulping, she left me.
It is obvious that the girl Alicia has been of decisive help to me!
Yet it is equally obvious that I cannot keep the children here.
Dibdin has been here and he has left me in a state of distraction, worse if possible than that I had been in before.
The good fellow endeavored to be vastly and solidly cheering.
"All nonsense," he growled, "about children being hostages to fortune. They are the only contribution a human being really makes to the world. All the digging that burrowing animals such as I do in the four corners of the earth, all the fuss that fellows in laboratories make over test tubes and microscopes and metals and germs, all the stuff that people sat up nights to put into those damned books of yours—all of that is done for them—for the next generation and the generations they will beget."
"Eloquent!" I flippantly mocked him; "but how is it you've elected to be what you call a tramp?"
"Elected?" he grunted disdainfully. "I didn't elect. It elected me. Besides," he continued, lowering his voice, "I would have given it up like a shot—given up anything, changed my life inside out, done anything if I had been able to marry the one woman I wanted. I'm one of those strange beasts for whom there is only one woman in the world—no other:
'If heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
I'd not have sold her for it,'