“Because Joey asks it—because it will ease his mind,” I heard her choked voice stammer, “only because of that, Mr. Dale—only for Joey’s sake as you say—I promise if—if you need me—” she came to a dead stop.
“To marry me, Wanza.”
“For Joey’s sake, Mr. Dale.”
“There, Joey!” I shook up his pillow and laid him gently back. “It is all settled, lad. Go to sleep now.”
“Kiss me, once, Mr. David.”
I kissed him.
“Kiss Wanza, now.”
Weariness was heavy in his eyes, his voice was quavering and weak; and forgetting all else but his gratification, forgetting Mrs. Olds, propriety, the consequences of so rash an act, I took Wanza in my arms and kissed her lips, then stumbled blindly from the room.
CHAPTER XXVII
MY WONDER WOMAN
WHEN I saw Master Joey smiling at me wanly from his pillow the next morning, his fever gone, his eyes without the abnormal brightness of the previous two days, and heard his modest request for cornmeal flapjacks to be stirred up forthwith in the old yellow pitcher, my heart leaped into my throat for joy. I was so riotously happy that I went outside to the Dingle, and almost burst my throat with whistling a welcome to a lazuli-bunting, newly arrived from his winter sojourn in the south land. He was so azure-blue on his head and back, so tawny breasted, so clear a white on his underparts that he seemed like some wondrous jewel dropped from Paradise into the syringa thicket.