“Very well, I will make that foolish promise. But”—she thrust out a little red underlip in a bewitching pout—“one month will soon come to an end, and after that?”
“After that you will leave the rest to me,” he said.
XXVII
In the guest-room of Madame Aoi’s house, the Lorrimers had waited fully a half-hour. Their patience was wellnigh exhausted. Lorrimer’s nervousness and anxiety threatened to result in utter collapse. The events of the last few months, through which this dissipated man of the world had suddenly found himself to be the father of a child he had never seen, and by the woman his conscience had never ceased to tell him he had wronged, were having their effect upon him.
He was a weak-natured man, easily ruled through his affections; but he was not bad-hearted. Many years ago the woman who was now his wife had prevailed upon him to divorce another wife that he might marry her. Richard Lorrimer’s affection for his second wife had evaporated during the honeymoon, and was nameless and dead in twelve months. Since then his life with her had been dull, aimless, purposeless, broken in its monotony only at intervals by the woman’s spasmodic efforts to fan the flame into life.
Now a strange and novel emotion was stirring the soul—if soul it could be called in such a nature—of Richard Lorrimer. He had a feverish, almost childish, longing to see, to possess, this child—his own. He was too sluggish and indolent by nature to have an imagination which would have pictured her in his mind. He had a hazy idea that she would be like any other American child, that she would, of course, be shy of him at first, but that the natural feeling of a child for its father would assert its power. He felt certain that she would prove a source of pleasure and comfort to him.
Nervously he paced the floor, with irregular, broken strides, stopping now and then to look about him, or to answer the impatient remarks that escaped his wife’s lips.
“This is beautiful,” she said. “I suppose we are to wait here all day.”
Lorrimer glanced about the room.