“I wouldn’t believe her even then,” he answered. “But how does it come that you—”
“You don’t need to claim her, if you don’t want to,” she said, ignoring all his astonishment. “Her mother gave her to me. She is mine, unless you claim her. I don’t care who her father was—or her mother, either. She is a helpless, innocent little child, thrown on the world—that is all the certificate of parentage I am asking for. She shall have what I never had—a childhood.”
He walked back and forth several times, turning sometimes to look at the girl, whom the child was patting on the cheek while she put up her little red mouth every now and then for kisses.
“Her mother is dead?” he asked at last, halting and looking down at her.
She thought his face was very hard and stern, and did not know it was because he, too, longed to take her in his arms and ask for kisses.
“Her mother is dead.”
“Then—I will take the child, if you will let me.”
“I don’t know,” she said, and tried to smile up at him. “You don’t seem very eager.” 356
“And you came back here for that?” he said, slowly, regarding her. “’Tana, what of Max? What of your school?”
“Well, I guess I have money enough to have private teachers out here for the things I don’t know—and there are several of them! And as for Max—he didn’t say much. I saw Mr. Seldon in Chicago and he scolded me when I told him I was coming back to the woods to stay—”