It gave me a familiar pang––ay, it hurt me sore––to feel this loving confidence vibrate upon the strings within me, and to know that the echo in my heart was but an echo, after all, distant and blurred, of the reality of love which was this fool’s possession.
“An’ she said that?” I asked, in poignant envy.
“Oh, ay!” he answered. “Afore she knowed I was a fool, lad, she ’lowed she had the best kid t’ Twist Tickle.”
“An’ after?” I demanded.
“It didn’t seem t’ make no difference, Dannie, not a jot.”
I wisht I had a mother.
“I wisht, Dannie,” said he, in a break of feeling for me, “that you had a mother.”
“I wisht I had,” said I.
“I wisht,” said he, in the way of all men with mothers, as God knows why, “that you had one––just like mine.”
We were come to the turn in the road, where the path descended at haphazard, over the rocks and past the pigpen, to the cottage of Eli Flack, builded snugly in a lee from the easterly gales. For a moment, in the pause, the fool of Twist Tickle let his hand rest upon my shoulder, which never before had happened in all our intercourse, but withdrew it, as though awakened 96 from this pitying affection to a sense of his presumption, which never, God witness! did I teach him.