“I never want to see the place again,” Archdale went on. “I’d have left it long ago but for the one thing. Now I’d go to-morrow if I could. Wouldn’t we, Mary?”
Mrs. Archdale nodded. Babs had one forefinger tucked into her neck, and nothing else mattered very much just then.
“Do you see, Jack?” she asked, smiling at him. “It’s her old trick; she always put her little finger into my collar. She hasn’t forgotten anything.” They bent together over the baby form, and forgot the world.
“I’ll have to sell off here,” Archdale said, straightening up, presently. “That won’t take very long, though. Then whenever you’re ready for me, sir——?”
“Any time next month,” the squatter answered. “The storekeeper goes on the first, and I suppose Mrs. Brown will want a few days to have the cottage put in order for you. She has violent ideas on disinfecting; not that I’m quite sure what she wants to disinfect, but it seems to make her happy.”
“But come soon,” Norah said eagerly. “I want to see Babs again before I go back to school.”
“I guess,” said Jack Archdale,—“I guess what you and Mr. Wally want about Babs is likely to happen, if ever I can manage it. You’ve got a sort of mortgage on her now, haven’t they, Mary?” To which Wally, who was lying full length on the grass with Jim, near the verandah, was understood to mutter, “Bosh!”
“Maybe it’s bosh; I don’t know,” Archdale said, drawing hard at his cold pipe. “But that’s the way we look at it. I—we . . . Well, it’s no darned good tryin’ to say anything.”
“It was only a bit of luck,” Wally mumbled, greatly embarrassed.
“Any one would have found her,” said Norah, incoherently. “We just happened to.”