was Barbox Brothers on his footstool, with a pint decanter on the rug, contemplating Polly as she built successfully, and growing blue in the face with holding his breath, lest he should blow the house down.
“How you stare, don’t you?” said Polly, in a houseless pause.
Detected in the ignoble fact, he felt obliged to admit, apologetically: “I am afraid I was looking rather hard at you, Polly.”
“Why do you stare?” asked Polly.
“I cannot,” he murmured to himself, “recall why. – I don’t know, Polly.”
“You must be a simpleton to do things and not know why, mustn’t you?” said Polly.
In spite of which reproof, he looked at the child again, intently, as she bent her head over her card-structure, her rich curls shading her face. “It is impossible,” he thought, “that I can ever have seen this pretty baby before. Can I have dreamed of her? In some sorrowful dream?”
He could make nothing of it. So he went into the building trade as a journeyman under Polly, and they built three stories high, four stories high: even five.
“I say. Who do you think is coming?” asked Polly, rubbing her eyes after tea.
He guessed: “The waiter?”
“No,” said Polly, “the dustman. I am getting sleepy.”
A new embarrassment for Barbox Brothers!
“I don’t think I am going to be fetched to-night,” said Polly; “what do you think?”
He thought not, either. After another quarter of an hour, the dustman not merely impending but actually arriving, recourse was had to the Constantinopolitan chambermaid: who cheerily undertook that the child should sleep in a comfortable and wholesome room, which she herself would share.
“And I know you will be careful, won’t you,” said Barbox Brothers, as a new fear dawned upon him, “that she don’t fall out of bed.”
Polly found this so highly entertaining that she was under the necessity of clutching him round the neck with both arms as he sat on his footstool picking up the cards, and rocking him to and fro, with her dimpled chin on his shoulder.
“O what a coward you are, ain’t you!” said Polly. “Do you fall out of bed?”
“N – not generally, Polly.”
“No more do I.”
With that, Polly gave him a reassuring hug or two to keep him going, and then giving that confiding mite of a hand of hers to be swallowed up in the hand of the Constantinopolitan chambermaid, trotted off, chattering, without a vestige of anxiety.
He looked after her, had the screen removed and the table and chairs replaced, and still looked after her. He paced the room for half an hour. “A most engaging little creature, but it’s not that. A most winning little voice, but it’s not that. That has much to do with it, but there is something more. How can it be that I seem to know this child? What was it she imperfectly recalled to me when I felt her touch in the street, and, looking down at her, saw her looking up at me?”
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