“And the baby’s name?” asked Mrs. Bonstone, when master was taking his soup and looking much refreshed.
Master dropped his spoon. “There’s only one name in this country good enough for my boy,” he said intensely.
“Oh! George Washington, of course,” she replied. “I might have known.”
After master took his soup and crackers, or “biscuits,” as Walter Scott calls them, he simply collapsed with fatigue. He couldn’t wait for supper.
You see he had been up all the night before in the cathedral, but he did not tell them this. Even with one’s best friends, I notice, human beings have reticences.
“I tell you everything, Boy,” said master to me afterward, “for you can’t repeat. If dogs could talk, they would not be such valuable friends to us.”
Mr. Bonstone was just going to take master upstairs, and put him to bed, when to the amazement of the men, Mrs. Bonstone began to cry.
“Stanna,” said her husband in a frightened way.
“I want a baby,” she said in a choked voice.