“Well,” said Eugene, turning as he thought he heard a slight noise, “that is certainly the sanest interpretation of the limitations of human thought I have ever read”—and then seeing the tiny Angela enter, clad in a baggy little sleeping suit which was not unrelated to a Harlequin costume, he smiled, for he knew her wheedling, shifty moods and tricks.
“Now what are you coming in here for?” he asked, with mock severity. “You know you oughn’t to be up so late. If Auntie Myrtle catches you!”
“But I can’t sleep, Daddy,” she replied trickily, anxious to be with him a little while longer before the fire, and tripping coaxingly across the floor. “Won’t you take me?”
“Yes, I know all about your not being able to sleep, you scamp. You’re coming in here to be cuddled. You beat it!”
“Oh, no, Daddy!”
“All right, then, come here.” And he gathered her up in his arms and reseated himself by the fire. “Now you go to sleep or back you go to bed.”
She snuggled down, her yellow head in his crook’d elbow while he looked at her cheek, recalling the storm in which she had arrived.
“Little flower girl,” he said. “Sweet little kiddie.”
His offspring made no reply. Presently he carried her asleep to her couch, tucked her in, and, coming back, went out on the brown lawn, where a late November wind rustled in the still clinging brown leaves. Overhead were the star—Orion’s majestic belt and those mystic constellations that make Dippers, Bears, and that remote cloudy formation known as the Milky Way.
“Where in all this—in substance,” he thought, rubbing his hand through his hair, “is Angela? Where in substance will be that which is me? What a sweet welter life is—how rich, how tender, how grim, how like a colorful symphony.”
Great art dreams welled up into his soul as he viewed the sparkling deeps of space.
“The sound of the wind—how fine it is tonight,” he thought.
Then he went quietly in and closed the door.
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