I do believe that that was the first time in my life I was ever really taken by surprise. I'm not the sort of person that's easily amazed. Always expecting the unexpected I get used to meeting it when it comes. But that time it had me fair. As we stared at each other I don't know which of the two was the more astonished. But he's a spry kid, is Jimmy. He knows his father when he sees him. And when he had got it clear that it was me, he came at me with a run.
'Dad!' he cried. 'Dad!'
Now I was in a quandary. I was getting into the region of the unusual. I wanted to put my arms about that boy, lift him on to my knee, and say, 'Hollo, Jimmy!' But if I went on like that, the show'd be busted. He'd go about telling people that I was his father. One of his father's two thousand and forty-five names was Montagu Babbacombe. I'd faced it out that I wasn't acquainted with any party of that name; supposing, when I said so, that I'd counted the cost. But this was an item which hadn't figured in the bill as I'd got it down at all. If I wasn't careful the Marquis would have to walk downstairs. So I kind of compromised.
'Little boy, whose little boy are you?'
'I'm your little boy--yours! yours! yours!'
He put his hands on my knees, and began to caper about as if he was happy. Now I'd been in the habit of playing with that small child a kind of a game in which I'd ask him whose little boy he was, pretending I didn't know; and he'd say, 'Yours! yours! yours!' He thought I was playing that game with him then. Which was where he was wrong.
'You take a good deal for granted, young gentleman.'
'I don't! I don't! I don't!'
He flung himself against me, still thinking I was playing the game.
'I say you do. May I ask how you've come here!'