However, of course no such dark uncertainties bothered Jerome. His marriage could hardly be called better than a failure. But at least, to him, this little son was a success.
He liked to drop down beside the cradle, his hands pressed together between his knees, and just look. He couldn’t get enough of just gazing, without saying anything at all. Sometimes Lili would make fun of his silent devotion; she took the baby a great deal more sensibly than Jerome did.
And yet, however sensibly, it was rather a fortunate thing that there were so many eager and competing hands always ready to relieve her of the burden of care; otherwise, it is to be feared, the happy and beaming mother would too often have felt bored and miserable, being so much tied down. Dear Lili, though she really loved the baby, in her own happy-go-lucky way, was never cut out to be a mother.
Manila was reached without special incident.
As the _Skipping Goone_ approached the harbour, a sailing skiff was sighted making straight out for the incoming schooner: a small pleasure craft with graceful lines, which had won races in its day. When the skiff came closer it was observed that some one aboard her was waving a handkerchief in very earnest welcome: a woman, nodding and smiling. With an abundant thrill, the impresario discovered her to be Flora Utterbourne!
After the first shock of joyous surprise, Mr. Curry had a curious feeling that it was somehow quite right and natural to find her here in Manila, and to have her come out in a skiff to meet him.
He wanted to climb right aboard the delightful skiff! He seriously—or rather a little hysterically—consulted, even, with Captain Bearman as to the practicability of such a manœuvre, but received such a look of withering scorn as to force him necessarily into a mood of resignation.
It seemed impossible to wait until the schooner came to anchor. Yet by hook or crook the thing had to be managed.
The little craft skimmed and tacked about, like a playful puppy barking at the heels of a charger, and often passed so close as to permit of the single passenger’s engaging in fragmentary talk with those aboard the larger vessel.
Curry went racing all over the _Skipping Goone_ in a wholly undignified fashion, seeking constantly shifting new points of vantage from which interchanges would be most convenient. He puffed and perspired. He was enormously excited, and made no attempt to conceal the interesting emotion. And Flora was excited too, though even under this stress her speech, as it came to him across the dazzling water, possessed that flexible and gliding, that complex and ever smooth-flowing quality, which he knew so well, with its quaint sprinkling, too, of italicised and quoted words.