“No, I thank you,” the child answered. “She says it's too strong a stim—stim—”
“Stimulant.” Galt supplied the word with a hearty laugh of amusement. “I declare, for a child, you have the largest vocabulary—if you know what that is—that I ever ran across. By-the-way”—and he drew the boy's head down against his breast and ran his hand through the soft, scented tresses—“you haven't told me your name yet. What is it?”
“Lionel,” replied the boy.
“Well, that is pretty enough so far as it goes, but what else?”
“What do you mean by 'what else'?” The child had hold of Galt's disengaged hand, and was toying with it as if admiring its strength and size, and he paused to look up into the dark face bending over him.
“Why, I mean, what is your full name?” Galt said, smiling into the rather grave faces about him.
“Lionel—just Lionel, that's all,” the child said, and he raised Galt's hand in both of his own and pressed it. “Most people have two names, but I've never had but one. I don't know why. Do you? I asked my mother about it one day when Mrs. Chumley was talking mean to her about me, and mamma went off to her room and cried. Grandmother told me never to speak of it to her again. My mother has two names—Dora Barry.”
Kenneth Galt felt as though his soul had suddenly died within him. The bonny head of his own child lay on his breast, its throbbing warmth striking through to his pulseless heart. Margaret sat rigid and speechless, and General Sylvester, in his desire to shield her, began chattering irrelevantly.
The long shadows of the descending sun crawled across the grass toward the hill in the east. The golden head remained where it lay, the tiny and yet vigorous fingers twined themselves about the larger inanimate ones. The eyelids over the boy's big, dreamy orbs wavered and drooped. He was tired and sleepy. He heaved a long, fragrant sigh and nestled more snugly into the arms that held him. A great, voiceless yearning born of the long-buried paternal instinct fired the dry tinder—the driftwood of years of misguided loneliness—in the man's being. A great light seemed to burst and blaze above him. He sat with his gaze on the old man's face, but in fancy he felt himself kissing the parted lips of that marvel of creation—Dora's child and his.