"O-h—perhaps," with just the faintest puckering of the mouth.
But spring passed without word from her, until there were times when Reno's impatience seethed like a colony of bees at hiving-time.
At last he wrote.
With unpardonable deliberation a brief answer came: Molly's son was a couple months old, but not yet finished enough to be much to look at.
He wrote again: Lola was pale from the city, and bored with herself and her maid; a farm with other children on it sounded like fairyland to her. Could some arrangement be made...?
Lola had been there a month before he had any word but her own hard-written and naturally not very voluminous love-letters, letters in which the homesickness was an ever fainter and fainter echo of the first wild cry, and in which the references to "Dandie" made it plain that she had adopted the other children's auntie into a peculiar relationship with herself. At last a postscript from Mrs. Loring herself:
"Wouldn't you like to come to see her? It's worth a longer trip."
"Of course I would. You're uncommon slow asking me. What kind of father, and man, do you think me?"
Molly was standing with the baby in her arms, chewing its chub of fist. In the warm wind soft wisps of blown brown hair curled all around forehead and neck. Her flesh was firm, transparent, aglow; her skin as clear, satiny, pink as the baby's. And what generous, sweet plumpness! She was at perhaps the most beautiful time of a woman's life—in the glamour of first young motherhood, with the beauty of perfect health and uncoarsened maturity.