“Why, of course. Come on!”
They started toward the house side by side. Suddenly Lionel remarked, timidly, “You haven't said you like me yet, but I suppose you do, or you wouldn't let me go with you in your house.”
“Yes, I like you—of course I do,” Galt answered, lamely and abashed.
“Very, very much, or just a little—which is it?”
“As much as any boy I ever met; there, will that do you, little man?”
“Have you met many? That's the question,” the boy laughed out, impulsively, and then his face settled into gravity as he eagerly waited.
“Yes, a great many,” Galt answered, as he wondered over the child's peculiar persistency. Dearing had said he was supersensitive. Could the trait be an unremovable birth-mark of the mother's unhappiness when overwhelmed with the sense of utter desertion? If so, then there was physical proof of the Biblical statement that the sins of fathers were visited on their children. Galt shuddered and avoided the appealing face upturned to his. Again he heard the musical voice, so like an echo out of the dreamy, accusing past, rising to him.
“If you did like me, it looks like you would take my hand. I wish you would.”
“There!” Galt forced a laugh as he took the soft, pulsating little fingers into his. As flesh touched flesh a thrill as of new life throbbed and bounded through him, and again he had the yearning to clasp his son to his breast as a woman would have done. As it was, no lover could have felt the touch of the hand of his mistress with keener, more awed delight. At one time, in a talk with Bearing, Galt had argued that even parental love was merely a physical function, like hunger for food, but that had been before this perplexing awakening. They had reached the front steps of the great house. An impulse he could not have analyzed led Galt to think of lifting the boy from the ground to the floor of the veranda, and he held out his arms. The child Sprang into them; his little arm went round the man's neck, and thus the steps were ascended. Was it a lingering pressure of affection in Lionel's arm that kept Galt from lowering him to the carpet when they had entered the great hall? He was sure he would put him down as they entered the library, but again he refrained, for the magnitude and splendor of the room had actually startled the child.
“Oh!” Lionel exclaimed, his eyes first on the great crystal chandelier, then on the gilt-framed pier-glass reaching from the floor to the ceiling.