“What is it, little one? Don’t look like that. What is troubling you?”
“Take me in your arms, nurse,” said the child.
The nurse seated herself on a low rocking-chair and lifted the boy into her embrace. His face was deadly white again, the faint trace of color having left it, but his eyes, large and beautiful, were fixed with wonder in them on the nurse.
“Are you,” he said, speaking very slowly and with pauses between, “the same woman—who—used to nurse me when—I was—very ill—at home?”
“But”—he glanced up at her—“your hair isn’t red now: it’s gold, and I _like you_.”
“Lay your head on my breast, little man. I am so glad you like me. I like you, too.”
The child’s dark head fell upon the woman’s breast, and a moment afterwards he sank into a gentle sleep.
“He’ll do, he’ll live,” she muttered. “Luke Tarbot, what a sell for you! He’ll live, he’ll live! Thank God! Yes, I can manage everything my own way now. Luke thought himself cleverer than I. I am playing my own game, and this”—she glanced at the child—“this little fellow is the ace of trumps.”
Nurse Ives presently lifted the boy and carried him into the next room. She undressed him and lay down beside him, taking him in her arms. The child slept during all the night, but the woman lay awake. She was too excited to sleep—she was a desperate woman, and she was playing a desperate game.
In the morning the child awoke, looking much better. He was now lively and full of questions, anxious to go home, talking frequently about his mother, about Barbara and Dick.
“Why are you keeping me here?” he said to Nurse Clara, but though he asked the question he was not in the least alarmed. He was only seven years old: a precocious boy of his age; but at seven our faith is large, and we believe, as a rule, what is said to us.
During the following day Nurse Ives did not dare to leave him. While she watched him, and played with him, and chatted and got him to tell her his innocent thoughts, she was turning over a weighty problem in her mind. It would, she felt certain, be madness to confide her secret to another, and yet she knew that if she married Tarbot, as she meant to do almost immediately, she must get some one to help her in the care of the boy.