"It shows that the man had some good in him. It shows that he was ashamed to use the money upon himself. We must do something for the poor wife, Dawson."
"She will easily get work, and she will be far better without her sot of a husband. She did not cry when I told her everything. 'I ought to have left him long ago,' she said, 'but I tried to save him. Thank God we have no children,' That seemed to be her most insistent thought, for she repeated it over and over again. 'Thank God that we have no children.'"
"I hope that you were gentle with her, Dawson," said I, deeply moved. Long ago the wife had come to me and pleaded for her husband. She had shed no tear; she had admitted the justice, the necessity, of my sentence. "Can you not give him another chance?" she had asked. "No," I had answered sadly. "He has exhausted all the chances." When she had risen to go and I had pressed her hand, she had said, still dry-eyed, "You are right, sir, it is no use, no use at all. Thank God that we have no children."
"I hope that you were gentle with her, Dawson," I repeated.
He astonished me by the suddenness of his explosion. "Damn," roared he--"damn and blast! Do you think that I am a brute. Gentle! It was as much as I could do not to kiss the woman, as your little daughter kissed me, and to promise that I would get her husband off somehow. But I should not be a friend to her if I tried to save that man."
So Dawson had soft spots in his armour of callousness, and little Jane's instinct was far surer than mine. She had taken to him at sight. When I tried to get from her why, why he had so marked an attraction for her, her replies baffled me more than the central fact. "I love Colonel Dawson. He is a nice man. He has a little girl like me. Her name is Clara. Her birthday is next month. I shall save up my pocket money and send Clara a present. I like Colonel Dawson better even than dear Bailey." I tore my hair, for "Bailey" is a wholly imaginary friend of little Jane, whom I invented one evening at her bedside and who has grown gradually into a personage of clearly defined attributes--like the "Putois" of Anatole France. Dawson and "Bailey"; they are both "nice men" and little Jane's friends; she is sure of them, and I expect that she is right. Children always are right.