Maisie pinned him down to it, both arms around him, kneeling at his side, her face--Betty’s young face!--looking up to him in winsome appeal.
“Father!” she said, and her voice was full of soft cajolery, “if any one took Mother away from you, wouldn’t you feel it dreadfully?” He had a sudden little flitting vision of a crisis ten years back. “Would life be worth anything to you?--I mean it seriously.” She paused for a reply he refused to give. “Well, Father--that’s just what life will be like to Jim if you take me away from him!”
“I don’t see the necessity of the parallel,” he countered, feebly.
“Oh, yes, you do. And Father!--If any one took you away from Mother?--What would life be like to her?--You know! _Just a dreary blank!_--And that’s what my life will be like if you send Jim away from me!”
She put her hand over his mouth, a deliciously soft young hand, with a faint fragrance that reminded him----
“No!” she continued, inexorably. “Listen to me! I haven’t finished. If any one took you from Mother, and she knew where to find you--what would she do? You know! She would go to you, whatever was in the way!--And, Father, that’s what I should do!--Father!” she said, and her tone was full of solemn warning, “would you like to think of your darling little Maisie starving somewhere in a top back room--and hating you, _hating you_!” her voice suddenly became almost genuinely vicious, “because you wouldn’t give her husband a chance to earn his living? Would you like to sit day after day, not knowing where she was, wondering all sorts of things--with Mother sitting on the chair opposite and not daring to say a word--day after day, and year after year, and never hear from her any more?--And all because you were a stubborn, foolish old man who had forgotten what real love was!”
“But, Maisie----” he did not himself know what he was going to say.
She snuggled up close to him, looked up into his face.
“Dadsie!” she said, and the voice was the voice of the child Maisie who had so often looked up from his knee with just that irresistible smile which had brought strange tears to his eyes then as it did now--sudden tears he could not quite keep back. “Dadsie!” she said once more and her tone went straight to his heart. “You do love your little Maisie, don’t you? And you want to make her happy--all her life you have wanted to make her happy and you’re going to make her happy now. You are going to give her Jim, her man--like you are Mother’s man--a chance to make good. You are going to give us both a chance to make good together--like you and Mother have made good together. You are still going to be Maisie’s dear, good, kind, generous father whom she will always love--aren’t you, Dadsie?”