“Oh, this is pure joy,” she said; “I feel already so relieved and happy because I am near you. I have longed for you so much.”
“And could you really not come?”
His mother shook her head sadly.
“Poor woman!” said the lady, and both looked for a long time into each other’s eyes.
“And this, I suppose, is my godchild?” the lady exclaimed, pointing towards Paul, who clung to his mother’s dress and sucked his thumb.
“Oh, fie! take your finger from your mouth,” said his mother. And the beautiful, kind lady took him on her lap, gave him a teaspoonful of honey—“as a sort of foretaste,” she said—and asked him after his little sisters, about school, and all sorts of other things which it was not at all difficult to answer, so that at last he almost felt comfortable on her lap.
“And what things do you know already, you little man?” she asked him at last.
“I can whistle,” he answered, proudly.
The kind woman laughed heartily, and said, “Well, then, whistle us something.”
He pointed his lips and tried to whistle, but the sound would not come; he had forgotten it again.