“You 'ASKED Jimmy'?” repeated Alfred.
“Yes,” confirmed Aggie, with easy confidence, “we wanted you to get used to the idea gradually.”
“The idea,” echoed Alfred. He was afraid to allow his mind to accept too suddenly the whole significance of their disclosure, lest his joy over-power him. “You—you—do—don't mean——” he stuttered.
“Yes, dear,” sighed Zoie, with the face of an angel, and then with a languid sigh, she sank back contentedly on her pillows.
“My boys! My boys!” cried Alfred, now delirious with delight. “Give them to me,” he called to Aggie, and he snatched the surprised infants savagely from her arms. “Give me ALL of them, ALL of them.” He clasped the three babes to his breast, then dashed to the bedside of the unsuspecting Zoie and covered her small face with rapturous kisses.
Feeling the red faces of the little strangers in such close proximity to hers, Zoie drew away from them with abhorrence, but unconscious of her unmotherly action, Alfred continued his mad career about the room, his heart overflowing with gratitude toward Zoie in particular and mankind in general. Finding Aggie in the path of his wild jubilee, he treated that bewildered young matron to an unwelcome kiss. A proceeding which Jimmy did not at all approve.
Hardly had Aggie recovered from her surprise when the disgruntled Jimmy was startled out of his dark mood by the supreme insult of a loud resounding kiss implanted on his own cheek by his excitable young friend. Jimmy raised his arm to resist a second assault, and Alfred veered off in the direction of the officer, who stepped aside just in time to avoid similar demonstration from the indiscriminating young father.
Finding a wide circle prescribed about himself and the babies, Alfred suddenly stopped and gazed about from one astonished face to the other.
“Well,” said the officer, regarding Alfred with an injured air, and feeling much downcast at being so ignominiously deprived of his short-lived heroism in capturing a supposed criminal, “if this is all a joke, I'll let the woman go.”
“The woman,” repeated Alfred; “what woman?”