And then Peter took down a tiny picture of the sort we call in the village "card size," and gave it to her.
It was a little boy of not more than five, in a straight black coat dress, buttoned in the front and trimmed with broad black velvet strips, and having a white scalloped collar and white cuffs. One hand was resting on the back of a camp-chair and the other held a black helmet cap. The shoes had double rows of buttons, and for some secret reason the photographer had had the child laboriously cross one foot negligently over the other. The fine head, light-curled, was resting in the horns of that ex-device that steadied one out of all semblance to self. But in spite of the man who had made the picture, the little boy was so wholly adorable that you wanted to say so.
I do not know how she knew. I think that I would not have known. But Miggy knew, and her knowing made me understand something which evidently she herself did not understand. For she looked at the picture and looked at it, a strange, surprised smile on her face. And,
"Well, well, _well_," she said again. "I never thought about that before. I mean about you. _Then._"
"Would--would you want that picture, Miggy?" Peter asked; "you can have it if you do."
"Can I really?" said Miggy. "Well, I do want it. Goodness...."
"I always kind of thought," Peter said slowly, "that when I have a son he'll look something like that. He might, you know."
Peter was leaning beside her, elbows on the table, and Miggy looked up at him over the picture of the child, and made her three little nods.
"Yes," she said, "you would want your little boy to look like you."
"And I'd want him named Peter. It's a homely old name, but I'd want him to have it."
"Peter isn't a homely name," said Miggy, in a manner of surprise. "Yes, of course you'd want him--"
The sentence fell between them unfinished. And I thought that Miggy's face, still somewhat saddened by the little Kenneth and now tender with its look for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing of colour. But then I saw that this would be the light of the sunset on her cheeks, for now the West was become a glory of rose and yellow, so that it held captive her eyes. It is too frail a thing for me to have grasped by sense, but the Moment seemed to say--and could give no reason--that our sunset compact Miggy kept then without remembering the compact.