by Sara Seale
The room was very quiet.
“If it’s your leg,” she said shyly, “you needn’t mind. It only makes me—fonder.”
She saw the knuckles whiten on the handle of his stick, and he cried as once before:
“I don’t want pity. That’s the last thing that must be between you, and me.”
She said gently:
“But compassion isn’t pity. Compassion is one of the great truths. Without it you can’t have understanding or affection or—or love. I remember Mrs. Dingle once saying that the pride and bitterness of the maimed was a thing no woman could understand, because to a woman her man didn’t change because he lost a leg or an arm. And it’s true, Julian, and that isn’t pity, it’s love.”
For a long moment he stood watching her with eyes that were suddenly hungry, but he could not speak, and suddenly she was afraid of him no longer.
“Oh, Julian, you’re so stubborn!” she cried, and dropping her belongings in a heap on the floor, she sprang across the rest of the space between them and flung both arms round his neck. “If—if you pounce on me now, I’ll cry all over you.”
For a moment he resisted her, then his arms closed round her, holding her against his breast in one convulsive, protective movement.
“You must show me the way, my foundling,” he said at last, his black head bent to hers. “You must show me the way to your own wisdom and—infinite compassion.”
Above their heads, Benjamin Emanuel Blacker looked down with a disapproving eye, and as if aware of him, they glanced up, and Jennet put out her tongue at him.
“If you ever do that to me when I’m the Great and Good Founder of the Jennet Brown Orphanage, I’ll take you across my knee,” said Julian severely.
She looked up at him swiftly.
“Oh, Julian, are you really going to? An orphanage that’s a real home?”
He touched her ardent face tenderly.
“I think so. It will be something to do that’s unaffected by the state of my health, and I have an idea that I owe a pretty large debt to orphans.”
“The Jennet Brown Orphanage,” she said slowly. “That sounds wonderful.”
“And,” said Julian with returning severity, “I’ll also take you across my knee if you ever run away from me again—do you hear?”
She gave him a smile of untroubled sweetness.
“I’ll never want to,” she said, and he replied gravely:
“I hope you never will. I was so stupid, Jennet, with my half-baked theories—and then I had to go and fall in love with you, and that served me right.”
“Yes, it did, didn’t it?” she agreed sedately, and picked up her hat from the floor and held it up. “Oh, Julian! My hat!” One of them had trodden in the middle of the crown.
“Throw it out of the window,” said Julian promptly. “I’ll buy you another when we get to town.”
Still a little shocked, Jennet tossed it away, as twice before she had done at his bidding, and together they watched it whirl blithely across the playground In the November wind, coming at last to rest on a statue of the Founder.
“Let’s go,” said Julian.
THE END