Mr. Huntress resolved to adopt him legally, and do all in his power to atone for the long interval of darkness and mental incapacity to which he had been so strangely doomed.
Geoffrey began at once to regard his new friends with the greatest confidence and affection, while toward Gladys he manifested the most devoted love.
She, on her part, regarded him with tenderest compassion and sympathy, for, in spite of his remarkable beauty and natural ability, he was truly a pitiable object, with the simple mind and manners of a child five years of age in a body of fifteen; for he soon began to develop rapidly, physically, after his restoration, and bade fair to be a man of splendid physique.
He was not long in realizing that he was far from being like other boys of his age, and he began to be very sensitive over the fact—to grow grave and thoughtful, and sometimes positively unhappy.
“Why can’t I be like other boys?” he once asked of Mr. Huntress, with a perplexed look on his fine face, and the gentleman kindly explained that, when he had been very young, some one or something must have struck him a blow on the head which had injured his brain, so that for years it had been the same as if sound asleep, and had only just waked up again; that his body had grown, but his mind had not.
“Oh, I know,” Geoffrey returned, with a startled look, a new light coming into his eyes. “Jack threw a great stick of wood at me.”
“What made him do that?” Mr. Huntress asked, eagerly.
The boy bent his head, and seemed trying to recall the events of that dim past.
“He came into the kitchen with a dreadful red face,” he said, “and he was very ugly to Margery—I can’t think about what. He put his hands around her neck, and she screamed. I ran up and struck him, and told him I’d tell my papa, and—that’s all I know,” he concluded, with a sigh.
Mr. Huntress could imagine that the man was intoxicated, and being in a frenzy, he had perhaps seized a stick of wood from the hearth, thrown it at the child, and knocked him senseless.