"What is all this?" he asked his Friend. He laid down the rattle, and felt suddenly lonely and unhappy.
"Little pet—ug—la—la—goo—losh!" Henry Fitzgeorge raised his eyes. His Friend was a long, long way away; his eyes grew cold with contempt. He hated this thing that made the noises and closed out the light. He opened his eyes, he was about to burst into one of his most abandoned roars when his stare encountered his mother. Her eyes were watching him, and they had in them a glow and radiance that gave him a warm feeling of companionship. "I know," they seemed to say, "what you are thinking of. I agree with all that you are feeling about her. Only don't cry, she really isn't worth it." His mouth slowly closed then to thank her for her assistance, he raised the rattle and shook it at her. His eyes never left her face.
"Little darling," said the lady friend, but nevertheless disappointed. "Lift him up, Jane. I'd like to see him in your arms."
But she shook her head. She moved away from the cot. Something so precious had been in that smile of her son's that she would not risk any rebuff.
Henry Fitzgeorge gave the strange lady one last look of disgust.
"If that comes again I'll bite it," he said to his Friend.
When these visitors had departed, he lay there remembering those eyes that had looked into his. All that day he remembered them, and it may be that his Friend, as he watched, sighed because the time for launching him had now come, that one more soul had passed from his sheltering arms out into the highroad of fine adventures. How easily they forget! How readily they forget! How eagerly they fling the pack of their old world from off their shoulders! He had seen, perhaps, so many go, thus lustily, upon their way, and then how many, at the end of it all, tired, worn, beaten to their very shadows, had he received at the end!
But it was so. This day was to see Henry Fitzgeorge's assertions of his independence. The hour when this life was to close, so definitely, so securely, the doors upon that other, had come. The shadow that had been so vast that it had filled the room, the Square, the world, was drawn now into small and human size.
Henry Fitzgeorge was never again to look so old.