"Oh yes! I don't mind that part of it." ("This is worse than the Inquisition; I don't know but that she will get me in spite of everything!")
"Oh dear!" thought Mrs. Oliver, "he does n't want to come; and I don't want him to come, and I must urge him to come against his will. How very disagreeable missionary work is, to be sure! I sympathize with him, too. He is afraid of petticoat government, and fears that he will lose some of his precious liberty. If I had fifty children, I believe I should want them all girls."
"Besides, dear Mrs. Oliver," continued Edgar, after an awkward pause, "I don't think you are strong enough to have me here. I believe you 're only proposing it for my good. You know that I 'm in a forlorn students' boarding-house, and you are anxious to give me 'all the comforts of a home' for my blessed mother's sake, regardless of your own discomforts."
"Come here a moment and sit beside me on Polly's footstool. You were nearly three years old when Polly was born. You were all staying with me that summer. Did you know that you were my first boarders? You were a tiny fellow in kilts, very much interested in the new baby, and very anxious to hold her. I can see you now rocking the cradle as gravely as a man. Polly has hard times and many sorrows before her, Edgar! You are old enough to see that I cannot stay with her much longer."
Edgar was too awed and too greatly moved to answer.
"I should be very glad to have you with us, both because I think we could in some degree take the place of your mother and Margery, and because I should be glad to feel that in any sudden emergency, which I do not in the least expect, we should have a near friend to lean upon ever so little."
Edgar's whole heart went out in a burst of sympathy and manly tenderness. In that moment he felt willing to give up every personal pleasure, if he might lift a feather's weight of care from the fragile woman who spoke to him with such sweetness and trust. For there is nothing hopeless save meanness and poverty of nature; and any demand on Edgar Noble's instinct of chivalrous protection would never be discounted.
"I will come gladly, gladly, Mrs. Oliver," he said, "if only I can be of service; though I fear it will be all the other way. Please borrow me for a son, just to keep me in training, and I 'll try to bear my honors worthily."
"Thank you, dear boy. Then it is settled, if you are sure that the living in the city will not interfere with your studies; that is the main thing. We all look to you to add fresh laurels to your old ones. Are you satisfied with your college life thus far?"
("They have n't told her anything. That 's good," thought Edgar.) "Oh yes; fairly well! I don't--I don't go in for being a 'dig,' Mrs. Oliver. I shall never be the valedictorian, and all that sort of thing; it does n't pay. Who ever hears of valedictorians twenty years after graduation? Class honors don't amount to much."