“I like America,” said Eugene; “but I detest England.”
“There’s where you’re wrong,” said the sergeant. “If I hated England, I should feel like a child hating my mother. They’re a magnificent nation over there; though sometimes they provoke us, and sometimes we provoke them. However, they’ll stand more goading from us than they will from any other people on the face of the earth. Just you make a note of that, my boy. You’ll find it’s true some day, and then you will appreciate them.”
“Possibly,” said Eugene; “in the day that tolerate the republic in France.”
“Queer little lad,” said the sergeant, affectionately laying a hand on Eugene’s smooth head. “You can’t look ahead and see yourself a tolerant man?”
Eugene rarely let a question go unanswered. He had been brought up to reply to every remark addressed to him; but seeing he had some difficulty in answering this, the sergeant went on. “I can. You have a fair start toward making a first-class,—what is it they call those people that are at home among all nations,—oh, yes, a cosmopolite. Wife, suppose I go on with my reading?”
“Yes, do,” she replied, as the sergeant again took up his book.
Eugene sat down at a little distance from him, and listened attentively to a tale of far-away Africa. Mrs. Hardy listened, too, for a short time; then she laid down her work and gazed attentively, first at the boy on the sofa, and then at her husband beside her. Something stirred softly in her heart as she looked at these two beings,—her husband and her adopted son. For them she felt that she could endure any hardship, any privation. If the occasion should arise, she felt that she could even lay down her life for them.
“I used to think that I was happy, but I am happier now,” she murmured. “My love for my husband makes me love the boy more, and my love for the boy makes me love my husband more.”
Eugene, as if aware that her attention was concentrated on him, began to fidget in a sensitive way, then he got up and moved to a chair next her. She took his hand in hers, and the boy leaned his head against her shoulder while he again listened to the reading.