“Do you mean it?” asked Hobart Eddy.
I do not know what she may have said to this, for the new note in his voice terrified me. Neither do I know what his next words were, but their deliberation had vanished and in its stead had come something, a pulse, a tremor....
I remember thinking that I must do something, that it was impossible that I should not do anything. I looked helplessly about the great empty orchard with its mock-sentinel trees, and down into Enid’s baby’s eyes. And on a sudden I caught him in my arms and lifted him high until his head was within the sweetness of the lowest boughs. He did what any baby in the world would have done in that circumstance; he laughed aloud with a little coo and crow at the end so that anybody in that part of the orchard, for example, must have heard him with delight.
The two in the orchard arbour did hear. Mrs. Trempleau leaned from the window.
“Ah,” she cried, in her pretty soaring emphasis, “what a picture!”
“Is he not?” I answered, and held the baby high. On which she said some supreme nonsense about Elizabeth and the little John and “Hobart—see!” she cried.
The two came out of the arbour, and Mrs. Trempleau made little dabs at the baby and then went picturesquely about filling her arms with blossoms. Hobart Eddy threw himself on the grass beside me and watched her. I looked at them all: at the woman who was like thin flame, at the man who watched her, indolent, confident, plainly allured, and at Enid’s baby. And,
“There,” said I, abruptly to the baby, “is your godfather.”
Hobart Eddy turned on his elbow and offered him one finger.
“It’s like being godfather to a rose,” he said smiling, and his smile had always the charm and spontaneity of his first youth.