“No doubt, but I have an uneasy feeling at times that she looks upon the children as puppies.”
“Oh no, dear one, I feel sure she knows they have souls.”
“I wonder,” Mr. Darling said thoughtfully, “I wonder.” It was an opportunity, his wife felt, for telling him about the boy. At first he pooh-poohed the story, but he became thoughtful when she showed him the shadow.
“It is nobody I know,” he said, examining it carefully, “but he does look a scoundrel.”
“We were still discussing it, you remember,” says Mr. Darling, “when Nana came in with Michael’s medicine. You will never carry the bottle in your mouth again, Nana, and it is all my fault.”
Strong man though he was, there is no doubt that he had behaved rather foolishly over the medicine. If he had a weakness, it was for thinking that all his life he had taken medicine boldly; and so now, when Michael dodged the spoon in Nana’s mouth, he had said reprovingly, “Be a man, Michael.”
“Won’t; won’t,” Michael cried naughtily. Mrs. Darling left the room to get a chocolate for him, and Mr. Darling thought this showed want of firmness.
“Mother, don’t pamper him,” he called after her. “Michael, when I was your age I took medicine without a murmur. I said ‘Thank you, kind parents, for giving me bottles to make me well.’ ”
He really thought this was true, and Wendy, who was now in her nightgown, believed it also, and she said, to encourage Michael, “That medicine you sometimes take, father, is much nastier, isn’t it?”