“You are smaller than he,” Galt said, lamely.
“Then it wasn't because you like me?” Galt felt the little hand stiffen, as if some impulse of dormant confidence in the tiny palm had forsaken it.
“Yes, it was because I like you,” Galt said, warmly, and, obeying a desire he refused to combat, he raised the boy in his arms and held him tight against his breast. “If he had hurt you, Lionel, I don't know what I should have done.”
“Then I'm glad I made him bellow,” the boy said, with a little laugh, as he got down to the ground. “Something had to be done, you know, after he said that about my mother.”
Yes, something had to be done, Kenneth Galt told his tortured inner self, as he stood and watched the boy trip lightly homeward—some one had to fight and struggle and smart as a consequence of the wrong that had been done, and the duty had fallen on a little child. Through the slow, weary years of perhaps a long life the fight just beginning would go on, and the chief cause of it must shirk it all. Galt groaned, and clinched his hands, and turned back to his desolate home. He had contended that there was no such thing as spirit, and yet this remorse raging like a tempest within him certainly had naught to do with matter. He had argued that man, born of the flesh, could gratify all animal desires and suffer no ill effects except those excited by physical fear; but there was nothing to fear in this case. Dora's lips were sealed; no one else knew the truth, or ever would know, and yet the very skies above seemed turning to adamant and closing in around him.
CHAPTER XII
DORA BARRY sat at her easel absorbed in the painting of a picture, though the afternoon light was fading from her canvas in a way that made the work difficult, when her mother came to the door and glanced in.
“I have kept a lookout for fully an hour,” she announced, “but I haven't once seen Lionel. I am getting old and silly, I suppose, but I can't keep from worrying.”