Page:War; or, What happens when one loves one's enemy, John Luther Long, 1913.djvu/313

THE COST—WHO PAYS Don't you. A sunbeam in a dark place, you said. A dark place! I might have been worse, I expect. Do you think it's too late to begin to be better now?"

"You suit me," I answers, "just as you are—and everybody else, I expect. It would spoil you to be better. The world needs just such gay fellows as you, Davy, to counterbalance such as Jon and me."

"Ah, daddy," says Dave, "you're a flatterer—an arrant flatterer! I'm afraid you love me. And those we love—we never see their faults. We just—love 'em! And, I suppose, that is why love is blind. So that the faults mayn't outweigh the rest."

He turns a bit toward the voices, which are only a murmur now, as if everything was settled, and then he repeats:

"No, we never see the faults of those we love. We just love 'em! Like a sunbeam in a dark place! Well, daddy, sunbeams are welcome after bad weather. But how soon we forget that they are all about us when the bad 297