“Tell me about it,” the young man commanded, briefly.
“They had been out for a walk one night after tea, and it was quite dark when they returned. They stopped a moment on the steps, before coming in, and I was at an open window up stairs just above them. Your mother had been crying—I could tell by the sound of her voice—all at once she turned and threw her arms around the captain’s neck and sobbed:
“‘Oh, Will, I wish you would, for my sake and—for our baby’s sake.’
“‘I will, my darling,’ the captain told her, ‘it shall be done just as soon as I can turn myself, but it would ruin me to do it now. Have patience, my pet, and it will be all right in a few months more, at the furthest.’
“She didn’t say another word, only uttered a tired kind of sigh, kissed him softly, and then they went in. But I never thought much about it afterward. I didn’t know but what she had been coaxing him to leave the mines and go back to where they came from, for I’m sure it couldn’t have been nice for her to live there where there wasn’t hardly another woman fit to associate with her,” Margery concluded, thoughtfully.
But Geoffrey believed his gentle mother had been asking for something far more important than a change of residence; that would have been of comparatively little consequence to her, loving his father as she did. He imagined that she had been pleading to be recognized as Captain Dale’s lawful wife, so that her child might have honorable birth.
He sighed heavily, for the farther he went in his search the darker and more perplexing grew the way.
CHAPTER XXX.
A STARTLING RECOGNITION.
Reaching the public house where he had left Jack, Geoffrey quietly drew Margery into the small parlor, where he made her lay aside her bonnet and cloak, put her into a comfortable rocker to rest, and then went out to break the glad tidings of her existence and return to her husband.
He found him sitting alone on the porch outside the bar-room—nothing ever tempted him inside such a place nowadays—looking wistfully out toward the east, where the full August moon was just rising above the horizon in all its splendor.