“Yes,” he answered honestly, “I only thought of the sorrow in the stricken household. I didn’t think of you at all. And yet it was for your sake, too. Ah! Bess dear, my heart has been very tender for all mothers since I left you to fend for the little one alone. I can never make up for that—”
“Hush!” she interposed, “you have made up. Even if I’d been somebody else, and Betty somebody else, it would have atoned and doubly atoned for you to do what you have done,”—she laughed unsteadily, she was so happy that her words had become hopelessly tangled. “You know what I mean,” she finished.
“I know,” he smiled back.
“But you ought to have recognized Betty at once; there was no excuse.”
“I thought she was a dear little tot.”
“Why, Humphrey, she’s the very dearest, the sweetest, the most precious, the—”
He stopped the loving catalogue with a kiss.
“You’ll let me stay and find that out for myself, won’t you?” he asked humbly.
She clung to him, trembling all over, her face quite drawn and white.