Well, it couldn't be helped ... and I was going to tell you, not about Miriam Levey, but about my happiness and Evie's.
Today, in my house in Iddesleigh Gate, there are many things thrust into dark corners that will ever occupy odd corners of my heart. They are the pieces of furniture from that poky old place in the Vale of Health. The people of my household tell me they are shabby, but as I never see them divorced from a hundred gentle associations, their shabbiness matters nothing to me. In the children's day-nursery there is the old shop-damaged couch from the Tottenham Court Road cellar. Its pegamoid is frayed and its springs broken, but Evie lay on it before those destructive little hands came into being. She lay on it with her legs wrapped in an old, faded, mignonette-coloured Paisley shawl—for presently the days were shortening, we had started fires, and Verandah Cottage was a Cave of the Winds for draughts; and my housekeeper had a bad five minutes only the other day when that shawl nearly went out of the house with the bottles and crates and old rags. The bookshelves Evie used to dust and polish still serve me; and quite a number of smaller things, including that first wicker basket into which the "jangle" was put (Evie keeps that) carry my mind back in a twinkling to that early time.
Evie had her little jokes about our unborn mite. Still further to repair the slight on Hampton Court of our Greenwich honeymoon, the infant at one time was to be called "Hampton," but as she had ten different names for it each week, a name more or less didn't matter. Its eyes were to be so-and-so—the colour also varied day by day. If a boy, it was to be of my own bone and stature; if a girl, less. I used to joke with her when, seeing her brooding and gently smiling, I pretended to discover these and a hundred other patterns and specifications in her eyes; but, however lovely these imaginings were, they were no lovelier than herself. Though the days now seemed less long, the little élans with which she ran to me when she heard my step at night were a passionate rendering of herself far greater than before; and I will end this part of my tale with the first time, the very first, I heard her sing.
She had gone into the bedroom that night, and I had heard her moving about; and then there had stolen out low contralto notes that might have belonged to somebody else, so new were they to me.... She was happy. She was so happy that she was learning to sing. I stood listening, with tears gathering in my eyes and suddenly rolling down my cheeks....
She was happy....
She did not know why, a few moments later, with the face of one who hears joyful news, I pushed at the bedroom door and took her, half ready for bed as she was, into my arms.
Oh, to hear her, of her own accord, sing—and to know that soon her song would not more gently rock those feeble limbs and close those unknowing eyes than it now brought rest to my own weary frame and sleep to my own heavy eyes, weary with watching for the day that at last, at last was coming!