"Mean?" he interrupted. "Oh, nothing. Nothing, of course. I—I guess it's loneliness. There are a lot of people who think because I have a motor to smell, a yacht to make my friends seasick and a club window to decorate, that I'm contented with my lot. But at heart I'm the most domestic individual that ever desecrated a dinner coat; and sometimes the natural tendencies of the gregarious male animal will not down. There's too much of the concentrated quintessence of unadulterated happiness lying around here. Maybe that's it."
"We have been happy here, Tom—very, very happy." Then, quickly: "I'm sorry, Tom…. I understand, and I'm sorry."
He smiled.
"It's nothing, Kate," he declared, "nothing at all. You've got to expect a bachelor to kick every once in a while, you know. They're a peevish lot of old guys."
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY.
A FAIRY STORY.
Toward the child of his friend, and of his friend's wife, Blake felt not as men in his place would have felt. The love that he had for the dainty little thing of gold-brown hair, and gold-brown cheeks, and straight, sturdy little legs was the love of a man for his own. It seemed to him, almost, that she was flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, bone of his bone. It was the "almost" that hurt; for she was the child of the woman he loved, and of another man….
To love the wife of another man is a bitter thing—a bitter thing. To love with dishonor is not hard; but to love with honor were hard indeed. To go away, so loving, were to render more easy to bear the thing that must be borne. To stay—to see day by day the happiness that lieth beyond hope, were to stand in hell and gaze at heaven. And this were most bitter, most hard, of all. Yet this was what Blake had done. This was what Blake would do; and it was what he expected to keep on doing until there was no such thing as time and the souls of all men were dead. He did it because all that lay for him in life lay there, even though not the tiniest bit of it could he claim for his own. And he was a man of heart, as well as of head, and honor.
Perhaps it was because he had loved the woman who was the wife of his friend, since the day when she was as her daughter was now; that his love for the little one that was of her transcended all else in his being—all else save the one thing that he never mentioned, not even to himself. SHE had been like that; a dainty, pretty, loving, simple, naive, sturdy, rugged little thing, with wind-blown hair, and sun-tanned cheeks and legs—soft, gentle, infinitely appealing, generous, loving. In the little one that was of her, he saw her again, violet-eyed, glowing with the glorious abundance of vigor, building wondrous castles of blue beach clay, counting the soaring gulls against the soft blue of summer skies, wandering, laughingly, through daisy fields, rolling, a whirling little tumult of lace and ribbons and wildly-waving bare legs down the stacks of fragrant hay. She had been like that. Small wonder that on her child he lavished all the choked tenderness that cried, sometimes, so, so piteously for outlet.