Her heart was full of tenderness for the girl. "I would die rather than anything should happen to your child, Vesty," she cried, with a sincere impulse.
Vesty lifted those Basin eyes.
"Oh, he is not old enough yet to understand my worldliness," said Mrs. Garrison, with bitter lips.
For, from entrusting the child at first to her servants, while Vesty was in the sick-room, Mrs. Garrison had grown to have a jealous care for him herself. He had taken an occasion, and he had conquered her.
When she pleased him he dimpled and gave her, on appeal, an ostentatious kiss, composed wholly of noise and vanity. When she first displeased him he had tried conclusions with her by unhesitatingly administering a slap on the face.
Mrs. Garrison, the select and haughty, tingling from this direct Basin blow, watched the flame die out of the baby's eyes, in astonishment, not in anger. The blow felt good to her. Vesty treated her, though unconsciously, from such a height.
"My darling," she said sorrowfully, lifting the child in her arms, "would you hurt me, when I love you so?"
A bit of sugar sealed the reconciliation: while he devoured it little Gurdon leaned his head in tender remorse upon Mrs. Garrison's neck. She had handsome eyes—for him, full only of love and longing—and he saw strange tears in them. He never treated her again to corporeal punishment; while she, on her part, indulged him fully.
The attachment was so marked between them that he would, when he was well and had dined, very cheerfully leave Vesty for her society, to Vesty's secret chagrin and Mrs. Garrison's beating heart of joy.
"Do you mean to say that you will take the child back again—back to that squalid home—yes, for such it is, Vesty—that you will deprive him of all that might be, and give him up to a fisherman's wretched life and dreary fate?"