“The wagon will come for my box, Aunt Augusta,” he said, standing up white and very straight.
“Mother! Mother! He says he’s going to leave us! And his father told him to stay. Tell him to stay, Mother.” Peg’s face was red and indignant.
“And why are you leaving us, Paul? Come here and sit down and let us talk it over.”
Paul approached her, but did not sit down.
“Are you not happy here?” Augusta’s voice, when she chose, could carry a world of tenderness. Paul’s lip trembled. He could not trust his voice, and before Peg he would rather suffer much bodily injury than “cry like a girl.” So he wisely remained silent, while Augusta cunningly and carefully marshalled her arguments which she had spent much of the night in preparing. The boy would have often made reply but for his recreant lips which would not keep firm. In the midst of the one-sided argument the Colonel entered the room.
“Daddy! oh, Daddy! he says he’s going away!” stormily cried Peg, whose emotions had been deeply wrought upon by her mother’s moving argumentation.
“Is he, Peg?” enquired the Colonel gravely.
The Colonel’s quiet voice fell upon them like the doom of fate. For the first time since Paul’s first announcement to her two hours ago, his departure seemed possible, and, as she looked at her father’s serious face, inevitable. With a cry the child flung herself into her mother’s arms in a passion of tears.
“Oh, Mother, don’t let him go. I don’t want him to go.”
With a bitter look at her husband, the mother gathered her child into her arms for a brief moment or two, then lightly cried, “Hut! tut! What’s all this about? If Paul wants to go home for a while, why shouldn’t he go? We’ll see him every day. And he will come back again in a few days.”
“He will not. He says he will never come back. He says we won’t want him to come back. You did,” said Peg, glaring at the boy through her tears. “You know you did.”
Peg’s words released the boy’s emotional tension. He glared back at her, indignant that she should thus betray his confidence.
Hoping against hope, but too simply sincere to temporise, the Colonel turned to Paul and, as if talking man to man, said gravely, “You have thought this over carefully, Paul?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve been thinking all night.”