I cursed inwardly at his abruptness, though in truth he had done just what I was intending to do myself. As Mizpah, with a gasping cry, crushed the little one to her bosom, she went white as a ghost and tottered against the anvil. I sprang to support her, but withheld my arm ere it touched her waist, for even on the instant she had recovered herself. With wordless mother-cries she kissed Philip's lips and hair, and buried her face in his neck, he the while clinging to her as if never again for a moment could he let her go.
Presently, while I waited in great hunger for a word, she turned to Big Etienne and Grûl.
"My friends!" she cried, in a shaken voice which faithfully uttered her heart, "my true and loyal friends!" Whereupon she wrung their hands, and wrung them, and would have spoken further but that her voice failed her.
Then, after a moment or two, she turned to me,—yet not wholly.
The paleness had by this well vanished, and her eyes, those great sea-coloured eyes, which she would not lift to mine, were running over with tears. Philip took one sturdy little arm from her neck, and stretched out his hand to me; but I ignored the invitation.
"And what—what have you got for me, Mizpah?" I asked, in a very low voice, indeed—a voice perhaps not just as steady as that of a noted bush-fighter is supposed to be at a crisis.
The flush grew, deepening down along the clear whiteness of her neck, and she half put out one hand to me.
"Do you want thanks?" she asked softly.
"You know what I want,—what I have wanted above all else in life from the moment my eyes fell upon you!" I cried with a great passion, grown suddenly forgetful of Grûl and Big Etienne, who doubtless found my emotion more or less interesting.
For a second or two Mizpah made no answer. Then she lifted her face, gave me one swift look straight in the eyes,—a look that told me all I longed to know,—and suddenly, with a little laugh that was mostly a sob, put Philip into my arms.