“And happy birds that fly about the altar,” added Egbert, his little face lighting up. “Favver would love that, but he’d rather be with me and muvver.”
This was a poser for Mrs. Bonstone. However, she caught her breath, and was launching forth on a brave description of the glories of heaven when the door opened softly, and Mrs. Granton came in.
Naturally she didn’t like to see another woman in her house in the middle of the night, but the terrible circumstances blotted that occurrence almost out of her mind. She narrowed her eyelids, and visualised her boy in the place of Egbert. She was a real mother now.
Of course, Mrs. Bonstone was on the whole a much better woman, and she had been perfectly lovely to her little brown baby. I don’t suppose, indeed, that one could find a better counterfeit mother than she was, but mistress was the real thing.
Something told her what the child was going through, something told her what to do. She didn’t try to tell him stories, she didn’t try to appeal to his intelligence, she just smiled a triumphant mother smile, held out her arms to the stricken child, and he went into them.
She sat down on the bed, rocking herself to and fro, and saying, “There, there,” and patting him gently on the back while listening to his wild weeping.
His father and mother were dead, and his heart was broken. That was the whole thing. All the clever men and women in the world could not blind his eyes to his own intuition. He didn’t reason, he knew.
Presently she turned to Mrs. Bonstone. The child had whispered something in her ear. “Stanna,” she said gently, “he wants to know if you will please go to his play corner and bring all his toys here.”
With a somewhat mystified face, Mrs. Bonstone hurried away and presently returned with the skirt of her dress held up.
As she unloaded animals, toy guns, whistles, Noah’s arks and every sort of game on the floor, I caught a glimpse of her face.