Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/164

154 neither Jim nor I shut our eyes. Jim talked incessantly. His very heart seemed on fire; all the lonely, pent up, denied brotherhood in his great warm nature had burst forth into full life at the nestling touch of this poor little outcast child. He was so lifted by the intense sentiment to a plane of earnestness and purpose, that he seemed to me like a stranger and grown man, instead of like my two years chum and a boy some months my junior. I felt a certain awe of him, and of the strange, new scenes, which had so transformed him. Mixed with it all, was a half defined terror lest he might not be quite in his senses. To my thoroughly prosaic nature, there was something so utterly inconceivable in this sudden passion of protecting tenderness towards a beggar child, this instantaneous resolve to adopt her into the closest relation but one in the world, that no theory but that of a sudden insanity could quite explain it. Jim had one of those finely organized natures, from whose magnetic sensitiveness nothing can be concealed. He recognized my thought.

"Will," he said, "I don't wonder you think I 'm crazy. But you need n't. I was never cooler-headed in my life; and as for my heart, every bit of this love has been there ever since I was a little shaver. I never tell you fellows half I think. I never have. I know you 'd only chaff me, and I dare say you 'd be half right, too, for there 's no doubt I 've got an awful big streak of woman in me.