“What sort of a playroom have you got, my friend, to hold such an outfit?” asked Pavlo, smiling.
“Oh, the whole floor of a tower!” cried Piotr, triumphantly. “My little darling Malou arranged it all for me. She thinks of nobody but me. Don’t you, little darling Malou?” And with the most tender and winning smile imaginable, the boy clasped Marguerite’s waist in both arms and looked adoringly up at her.
“Voyez vous ça! There’s cheek for you!” cried Pavlo. “And what about your father and little Pavlo here? Doesn’t she think of them sometimes?”
The smile vanished from Piotr’s face. “Papa knew her long before she knew me,” he said. “Also he is an old gentleman with gray hair—so he doesn’t count; and as to that rubber bath-doll there,” and he contemptuously pointed at his little brother, “how could she love it? It only says Youm-youm and Gaga-gaga. It’s an idiot!”
As ill-luck would have it, the baby, wholly unconscious of the anathema pronounced against him, selected that risky moment for a coup-de-théâtre of immense magnitude. Sitting up on his blanket, he suddenly raised his head, opened his rosebud of a mouth, and in the rather heart-shaking fashion of the first word ever pronounced, clearly uttered, “Mayou!”
Marguerite, flushing with delight, started forward to catch him in her arms, but Régis, quicker than she, interposed himself, and, lifting the little fellow, began tossing him up and down as if nothing out of the common had taken place.
“What!” Piotr asked in a queer, trembling voice—“what did it say?”
Pavlo was on the point of translating his godson’s loyal effort to say “Malou” like Piotr himself, but a glance at Marguerite’s distressed face stopped him, and with a presence of mind quite above praise explained, instead: “Why, didn’t you hear, Piotr? He said Gou-gou or Mou-mou, or some other ununderstandable thing of the kind. He is too little to talk yet.”
“That’s good!” came from Piotr. “I thought he had said ‘Malou.’ And no one has a right to say that excepting me. Malou is my little darling Malou!”
“Oh, come, you’re getting to be a bore with your ridiculous ideas!” Pavlo interrupted, rather sharply, for, uninitiated into the risks of the situation, he was amazed at the extraordinary tolerance of Marguerite and Régis, as well as at the appalled glances exchanged between the nurse—a superb Bretonne in her gorgeous costume—and Garrassime, who had been standing behind Piotr, a silent witness of this curious scene.