“So I should have surmised.” Her tone was hardening. Her attitude was fearfully unyielding. It seemed to Baron that her gray hair, which rose high and free from her forehead, had never imparted so much severity to her features before, and that her black eyes had never seemed so imperious.
But Bonnie May was advancing very prettily. “How do you do, Mrs. Baron?” she inquired. She was smiling almost radiantly. “I do hope I don’t intrude,” she added.
Mrs. Baron looked down at her with frank amazement. For the moment she forgot the presence of her son. She took the child’s outstretched hand.
Perhaps the touch of a child’s fingers to a woman who has had children but who has them no longer is magical. Perhaps Bonnie May was quite as extraordinary as Victor Baron had thought her. At any rate, Mrs. Baron’s face suddenly softened. She drew the child into the protection of her arm and held her close, looking at her son.
“Good evening,” she said, as if she were addressing strangers.
“Who in the world is she?” she asked, and Baron saw that her eyes were touched with a light which was quite unfamiliar to him.
“I was going to tell you,” he faltered, and then he remembered that there was practically nothing he could tell. He saved time by suggesting: “Perhaps she could go up-stairs a minute, while I talk to you alone?”
“Would it be wrong for me to hear?” This was from the child. “You know I might throw a little light on the subject myself.”
Mrs. Baron blushed rosily and placed her hand over her mouth, wrenching a swift smile therefrom. She had heard of precocious children. She disapproved of them. Neither of her own children had been in the least precocious. “Who ever heard anything like that?” she demanded of her son in frank amazement.