Mary Rogers had struck a powerful blow for Gertie, and hedged her round with the respect of the young men, who otherwise might have turned her head as she grew to womanhood, with all her wondrous beauty and fascinating sweetness, but for a time she felt some misgivings as to the propriety of having taken Robert Macpherson as a lodger. But when she saw how quiet and unobtrusive he was, never seeking either herself or her child, unless he needed them for the sittings, her watchfulness gradually subsided, and she felt that her home was pleasanter for having the artist there.
Tom Barton came sometimes to see him, but he never asked for Gertie, and if by chance he saw her going out or coming in, he treated her with as much deference as if she had been one of the ladies from Schuyler Hill. For a few weeks Godfrey was there every day, and sometimes twice a day, but as she knew him better Mary had no fears of him, and trusted her darling to him as if he had been a brother.
And Gertie did him good, and always reproved him in her outspoken way, when she found him relapsing into careless habits of speaking, and kept him constantly upon his good behavior when he was with her. But she did not think him a gentleman, and she frankly told him so when in November he came to say good-by, before going to Andover, where he hoped to prepare himself for Yale the following year. In a laughing way he referred to her promise made on the ship, and she replied:
“I heard you say by George, and call your father the Governor, and you are not a gentleman yet;” but her lip quivered a little, and it was long ere Godfrey forgot the expression of the blue eyes, which looked at him so wistfully as Gertie said good-by, and told him so innocently how much she should miss him.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE NEW LIFE AT THE HILL.
It was just one year from the day when Edith came to Hampstead, and over the house upon the Hill a dark cloud was hanging, as hour after hour went by, and there seemed to be no hope for the pale-faced woman lying at the very gates of death, and talking in her delirium of things which no one understood. She had been thus ever since the birth of the infant boy, at which the colonel scarcely looked, so intense was his anxiety for the young mother, who, whenever he came near her with words of tenderness, motioned him away, saying:
“No, no, you mustn’t, you don’t know. It is not the first, as you think. Oh, my baby, I don’t know where she is; find her, Howard; find my baby for me.”
He brought her the little mite of flesh and blood wrapped in soft cambric and flannel, and said:
“Look, Edith, here is our boy; shall I lay it beside you?” Very wistfully the gray eyes glanced for a moment into the colonel’s face and then down upon the child, while a look of anguish crept into them as Edith cried: