She would have turned over the leaves and read other pretty trifles if it had been David instead of himself, he thought bitterly. He waited for a cold refusal. “You wouldn’t like ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses,’” Jimmy said unexpectedly. He had not removed his inquiring brown eyes from Jarvis’s face. Something that he saw there emboldened him. “It’s for little boys, littler than I am; but I like it.” Jarvis smiled, the singular smile new to his lips and of which he was not at all aware, any more than of the elemental changes in himself. “Perhaps I’d like it, too,” he said. “Nobody ever reads out loud to me.” “Read the one about the wind, Barb’ra,” urged Jimmy. “The wind and the kites. I like that.” Barbara turned over the pages slowly. “Shall I?” she asked Jarvis. Her eyes lingered irresolutely on his face for an instant. It was evident that she was wondering at the sight of him there, pale and grave, but with an unfamiliar gentleness in his eyes and about his unsmiling lips. “If you will,” he said. Read Barbara: “I saw you toss the kites on high And blow the birds about the sky And all around I heard you pass, Like ladies’ skirts across the grass— O wind, a-blowing all day long, O wind, that sings so loud a song! I saw the different things you did, But always you yourself you hid, I felt you push, I heard you call, I could not see yourself at all— O wind, a-blowing all day long, O wind, that sings so loud a song!” Her voice, flowing on like a brook over pebbles, fell to a sudden silence, as the wind of which she had been reading entered with a sudden rush, veering the yellow flame of the lamp to one side. Jimmy laughed joyously. “It’s come in here,” he said, turning a sleepily roguish face upon Jarvis, “to hear what you’re saying, Barb’ra.” She closed the book and laid it quietly upon the table. “You must go to bed now, Jimmy,” she said. The little boy whispered in her ear, his hands clasped about her neck. Her arm stole about his small body as she bent her head to listen. Jarvis watched the two hungrily—the child and the woman, and the eternal, unfading beauty of the picture smote him with almost intolerable poignancy. All that was best in life he had missed, blunderingly, blindly, and for what? “I go to bed all by myself now,” the little boy said proudly. He walked toward the door; then turned, hesitated, and flung himself upon Barbara. “I guess I’d better kiss you good-night, Barb’ra,” he cried. “Just think, I pretty near forgot!” He beamed shyly upon Jarvis. “Shall I shake hands with you?” he inquired, with a friendly little smile. “I b’lieve I’d like to.” Jarvis held out his hand and Jimmy laid his own in it gravely. Barbara stirred uneasily in her chair. “Jimmy, dear!” she murmured softly, deprecatingly. “I never s’posed I’d be shakin’ hands wiv you,” the child went on calmly. “Did you drive that short-tailed horse?”