“Come to me, Lionel,” she said, gently. “I want you to kiss me. Won't you, just once?”
The child stared as if scarcely believing that he had heard aright.
“What did you say, lady?” he asked, as he lingered hesitatingly.
She repeated her words more tenderly than before, and there was a mist before her sight as he came toward her.
“Do you like me now?” he asked, wonderingly. “Yes, and love you very, very much,” she answered, huskily.
“But you didn't ever so long at _first_; you didn't _yesterday_, when I asked you to see my church. You didn't just _this minute_, when I brought my mother's letter.”
“But I do now, ever and ever so much,” she said, adopting his tone, and, taking him into her arms, she pressed him passionately to her breast and kissed him on his brow, on his cheeks, and on his red lips. Then, holding him in her arms, and with no word of explanation to Galt, she rose. “Put your arms close around my neck,” she said, “and hug me tight. I am going to run over and see your mother.”
The child complied, timidly, a delicate flush of appreciation on his mobile face. Then she put him down, and, still not looking at Galt, she said:
“No, you needn't come, Lionel; I'll only be there a minute to return the letter. You may stay here and entertain your--your good friend.”
Galt, who had risen, stood looking after her for a moment, his countenance dark with the ever-constant despair within him. He felt the tiny, confident hands of his child as they pressed against his legs, and looked down into the sweetly smiling, upturned face.
“They _all_ like me now,” Lionel said. “She was the only one that didn't, but she says she does _now_. She kissed me. Did you see her? Oh, she's so pretty! She is--no, she isn't, but she is _nearly_ as pretty as my mother.”
Galt sat down and drew the boy first to a seat on his knee and then into his arms.
“She knows the truth,” he said to himself, in a tone of desperate indifference to fate. “Something in that letter told her.”
|AS she passed through the gate at the end of the lawn, Margaret looked back and saw the child and its father seated together.
“Yes, he is the one,” she mused. “He of all men! And yet I might have known it; he has adored the child since the moment he first saw it there on the lawn.”