"Well, you must have a good and loving reason, I'm sure. And probably
your love has taught you to know better than I can, what Jim would want
you to do," she said. "It shall be just as you wish, dear. Only you must
grant one little favour in return to please me. You are to wait for Jim
in the _den_. When his Father and I have hugged and kissed him a few
times, and made certain he's not one of my dreams, we'll lead him up to
that door, and leave him outside. It shall be my hand that shuts the
door when he's gone in. And I shan't tell him one word about the den. It
shall be a surprise. But he won't notice a thing until--until you and he
have been together for a while, I guess--not even the hobby-horse! He'll
see nothing except you, Molly--_you_!"

I implored--I argued--in vain. The making of the den had been her
inspiration. It was monstrous that I should have to greet her son there.
The pleasure of the den-surprise would be for ever spoilt for Jim. But I
couldn't explain that to his mother. I had to yield at last, tongue-tied
and miserable beyond words.

I haven't described the den to you, Padre. I will do it now, in the
pause, the hush, before the storm.

It's a quaint room, with a little round tower in each of the two front
corners. One of these Mother Beckett has turned into a refuge for
broken-down toys, all Jim's early favourites, which he'd never let her
throw away: the famous spotted hobby-horse starred in the centre of the
stage: oh, but a noble, red-nostrilled beast, whose eternal prance has
something of the endless dignity of the Laocooen! The second tower is a
miniature library, whose shelves are crowded with the pet books of Jim's
boyhood--queer books, some of them, for a child to choose: "Byron,"
"Letters of Pliny," Plutarch's "Lives," Gibbon's "Rome," "Morte
d'Arthur," Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," Kingsland's "Scientific
Idealism," with several quite learned volumes of astronomy and geology,
side by side with Gulliver and all kinds of travel and story-books
which we have most of us adored. It was I who had the task of sorting
and arranging this motley collection, and I can hardly tell you, Padre,
how I loved doing it!

The room isn't large, so the ten or twelve pictures on the walls are not
lost in a desert of bare spaces. These pictures, the toys, the books,
tennis-rackets, golf-clubs and two lovely old Persian prayer-rugs are
all of Jim's treasures brought to France. He must have been a boy of
in