Mr. Langley being summoned, had also to pause on the threshold. He was almost overwhelmed by the transformation, for which he was wholly unprepared. For Big Bell had helped her mistress carry through everything without his knowledge. He hadn’t so much as had inkling of the fact that the blinds had been raised every day a bit higher and for progressively longer intervals leading up to this handsome crisis. He felt absolutely dazed as he looked at his wife, as if he, too, had been dwelling in semi-darkness the while. He hadn’t seen her clearly for years upon years and one might have expected the strong light now to be disillusioning rather than flattering. But not so. Russell Langley could scarcely believe that the comely looking woman in the gay, flowered chair with the child cherished in her arms was his wife,—nor, indeed, that he was himself.
But somehow when his eyes wandered and fell upon the other Miller girl, the sight of her steadied him. Anna was as real as she was true blue. Wherefore everything was real, even that splotch of sunshine on the purple and crimson carpet which had so enchanted his youthful masculine fancy.
“What are you standing there for, Russell?” asked his wife in a voice and with a manner that were singularly what they would have been had husband and wife come through the twenty years hand-in-hand instead of separately. “Come here and listen to this wonderful baby.”
He obeyed as one in a dream. But when he stood over her, as he bent and kissed her, it cost him an effort not to try to take the child from her into his own arms. Mrs. Langley pointed her lean finger towards the lamb in the picture.
“What’s that, baby? What’s that, darling child?” she begged his royal highness to declare.
“Baa-baa,” returned the child, and looking up to Anna almost smiled. The girl dropped at his feet enraptured. Then she caught sight of the giantess as she had endeavoured to peep in unseen and called her in. Bell joined the group in an instant.
“O an’ the little angel he is, ma’am!” she exclaimed. “O to have him in me arrums but the oncet. Would he come to the likes of me, Miss Anna?”
“Sure, Bell,” said Anna, though Mrs. Langley frowned upon the bold request. But Big Bell held out her great strong arms, and, the baby responding with unusual readiness, gathered him tenderly into them. Mrs. Langley, who yielded him ungraciously, watched Bell suspiciously as she marched about the room with him, showing him the colleen on the parlour clock and the wee people on the silver water-pitcher. But when Bell put a bright blue worsted mat with a fringe of tassels on top of her head and cocked it at the baby, winking one eye, and the baby actually and unmistakably smiled, Mrs. Langley smiled, too. Nevertheless, she couldn’t endure it another second and demanded that Joe, Junior, be returned to her at once.
Bell was bold enough to ask her if she felt she was strong enough, and then gave him up reluctantly. “I’ve a way with ’em same’s ever,” she declared defiantly. “I brought up my sister’s babies till her man married again, and when I first went into service it was as a nurse.” She would have gone on, but suddenly her feelings overcame her and she turned and fled.