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Dinky-Dunk, staring at me as though I were a madwoman, went over to Dinkie's crib, and felt his forehead and the back of his neck, and held an ear against the boy's chest, and then against his shoulder-blades. He said it was all right, and that I myself ought to be in bed.
She stopped to pick it up and it was one of Dinkie's little stub-toed button shoes. "Let me see it," I commanded, as she made a foolish effort to get it out of sight. I took it from her and turned it over in my hand.
Then, after airing the house to rid it of the fumes from Iroquois Annie's intemperate griddle and carrying Dinkie's muddied overshoes back to the kitchen and lighting the Chinese hall-lamp, I went to the bottom of the stairs to call my husband down to supper. But still again that wordless feeling of something amiss prompted me to hesitate.
He further announced that he'd give an arm to see little Dinkie's face when that young outlaw stole his first ripe orange from the big Valencia tree in the patio. And Peter, in a post-script, averred that he could vouch for the flavor of the aforementioned Valencias. Tuesday the Fourteenth
For last night, after the usual demonstration, I slipped out to the Blue Room and found big Dunkie kneeling down beside little Dinkie's bed, with Dinkie's small hand softly enclosed in his dad's big paw, and Dinkie's yellow head nestled close against his dad's salt-and-peppery pate. It made me gulp a little, for some reason or other.
So I slipped quietly down-stairs and stowed Dinkie's overturned kiddie-car away in the cloak-room and warned Iroquois Annie the meekest-looking Redskin ever togged out in the cap and apron of domestic servitude not to burn my fricassee of frozen prairie-chicken and not to scorch the scones so beloved by my Scotch-Canadian lord and master.
I remembered about a dog always howling that way when somebody was going to die in the house. And I concluded, with an icy heart, that it was the death-howl. I tried to count Dinkie's pulse, but it was so rapid and I was so nervous that I lost track of the beats. So I decided to call Dinky-Dunk.
It would bring me drab and spiritless drudgery, and faded eyes, and the heart under my ribs slowly but surely growing as dead as a door-nail, and the joy of living just as slowly but surely going out of my life, the same as the royal blue had faded out of Dinkie's little denim jumpers.
If he'd only said that, and sat down and been the safety-valve to my emotions which all husbands ought to be to all wives, the igloo would have melted about my heart and left me nothing to do but crawl over to him and tell him that I missed him more than tongue could tell, and that getting Dinkie's daddy back was almost as good as getting Dinkie himself back to me. But we missed our chance.
Then I reached out for Dinkie's broken-toed shoe, and studied it for a long time. Lady Alicia crossed to the shack door, and stood staring out through it.... She was still standing there when Whinnie came in, with the stable lantern in his hand, and brushed her aside. He came to where I was sitting and knelt down in front of me, on the shack-floor, with his heavy rough hand on my knee.
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