“Pretty nice sort of a girl, isn’t she?” he remarked as he handed the child back to the waiting nurse, and when he went downstairs his wife heard him whistling a tune that had been a part of their early betrothal days, and hid her face in the pillow with a happy glow on it, although she was a staid and respectable matron.
It was noticed after this that Mr. Nichols contracted a habit of coming in each night and gazing at the child intently when he thought himself unobserved, and that he seemed to derive great and increasing satisfaction from the perusal. As the baby grew older her face lighted up for him as for no one else, and before she had reached her present age of two years they were sweethearts indeed, with a passion on his part which made it unbearable pain to him if she bumped her head or pinched her finger.
“How is Quintilia?”
The voice of a near neighbor arrested Mr. Nichols’s attention. A slow smile overspread his countenance at the mention of the beloved name, with which the doctor had playfully christened this fifth girl, to the exclusion of her lawful cognomen.
“Oh, she’s all right. At least I hope she is to-night—she hasn’t been very well for a couple of days; it’s bothered me a good deal.”
“My wife says that she grows prettier every day,” continued the obliging neighbor.
Mr. Nichols beamed. “She does. I’m coming home a little earlier to-night to see how she is. Her mother usually keeps her up for me when she’s well.”
He could not tell how much he hoped against hope that she would be up and looking out for him. He knew so well how the little lovely white thing with the starry eyes and glinting curls would run to the stairway in her nightgown, and sitting down on the top step with all the delicious fluttering and sidling motions of her babyhood, would thrust her plump, bare pink foot up against his rough cheek with the delighted cry of,
“Pa-pa, kiss a footie! Kiss a footie, pa-pa!”
Then how he would mumble and kiss that darling foot, and pretend to eat it, finally snatching the adored baby in his arms, laughing and struggling, to cuddle close to him when he pressed her to his heart, with the infinitely tender gentleness of the strong, as he carried her to her crib and laid her in it. His wife was always there, too, watching him with an indulgent smile. All love between them seemed to have grown deeper since it merged in this sixth child, whose advent had called forth a large offering of honest condolence from mistaken friends, and who had brought a joy which at first the parents decorously—nay, guiltily—concealed, to revel in it almost indecently afterwards.