Page:Steadfast Heart.djvu/72

 “Well,” said Dave, “you’re fixed up considerable now. Got anything to say?”

Angus raised his eyes with a trace of question in them. Clearly he failed to understand. Probably Angus Burke never had uttered or thought the words thank you.

“Be they mine?” he asked presently.

“They’re yours.”

“To keep?”

“To keep.”

“Dad won’t take ’em and sell ’em?”

“No.”

“Kin I wear ’em every day?”

“You’ve got to wear them every day.”

Angus breathed heavily—a sigh of mingled relief and satisfaction. As Wilkins said to Browning that night, “If he’d had a tail he’d have wagged it.”… This moment marked an epoch in Angus Burke’s life; it marked the dawning of a first affection for a fellow creature—an affection purchased as the affection of a savage might be purchased by a string of beads—but none the less a species of attachment…. For the first time in his life Angus felt stirring in his sluggish heart a quickened thing, unborn, which might develop into that emotion which men call love.

Fully equipped, and to the eye a new being, Angus started home with Wilkins. Both were