"There is no more to say,—but you want to see the baby?" suddenly.
"Certainly, Charlotte, certainly,—see the baby!" And the old Captain followed her, glancing about him in a mild imbecility of astonishment.
"God bless my soul!" he broke out at last. "The idea of springing a house and a baby on a man in one day! It assuredly is, child, the most unprecedented whim"——
"Yes, yes,"—dodging suddenly into a room, and bringing out a bundle of white linen and wool. She stood in the passage by a window, the red evening light falling about her.
"It's a boy," she whispered, lifting off the covering. "He is very like little Tom,"—an inexpressible awe on her face.
"Yes," said the Captain. He had meant to say a few sensible words to bring her to reason about this matter; but, instead, he took up the little white foot thrust out of the blanket and kissed it sheepishly, looking askance at the woman's figure and face bent over the child, beaming with a rare and tender beauty.
They said little after that. The mother stood playing with her baby, touching its cheeks and chin until it laughed. She forgot Lufflin was there, I suppose. Her soul seemed to be in her fingers, her pure passion to envelop the mite of flesh as the weak sunshine did herself, and to hold it in life. There was something in this wife-and-mother-love which poor Lufflin did not understand.
"Well, well," he said, "I'll go now. God bless you, Lotty! You'll let me have a share in this young fellow here, eh?"—and trotted down the back stairs, leaving her in the narrow hall. "Old Mounchere Jacobus must have been a good fellow," he thought, "to have deserved all this. God deals so differently with different men!"
She had nothing more to say about it, Madame Jacobus had told him; yet, standing there in the quiet cold light, within a few steps of the closed door behind which was her husband, her feet on the floor of the house she had worked hard to buy him, the child in her arms she would give him to-morrow, she thought she had touched in this hour the very depth and height of life.
"It is worth all the pain that's gone,—it's worth it all," she said again and again, pressing the boy so closely that he cried. When she turned to the window, the cold and gathering night somehow made her home more real, the future alive with great and good possibilities.