Glory came in to the cupboard, now, and began putting up the tea things she had brought from washing.
Mr. Armstrong had done just what, at first, he had meant not to do. Had he bethought himself better, and did he seize the opening to give vague warning where he might not speak more plainly? Or, had his habit, as a man of thought, discerning quick meaning in all things, betrayed him into the instant's forgetfulness?
However it might be, Glory caught glimpse of two strange, pained faces over the little board and its mystic pieces.
One, pale—downcast—with expression showing a sudden pang; the other, suffering also, yet tender, self-forgetful, loving—looking on.
"I don't know whichever is worst," she said afterwards, without apparent suggestion of word or circumstance, to her mistress; "to see the beautiful times that there are in the world, and not be in 'em—or to see people that might be in 'em, and ain't!"
They were all out on the front stoop, later. They sat in the cool, summer dusk, and looked out between the arched lattices where the vines climbed up, seeing the stars rise, far away, eastwardly, in the blue; and Mr. Armstrong, talking with Faith, managed to win her back into the calm he had, for an instant, broken; and to keep her from pursuing the thought that by and by would surely come back, and which she would surely want all possible gain of strength to grapple with.
Faith met his intention bravely, seconding it with her own. These hours, to the last, should still be restful. She would not think, to-night, of those words that had startled her so—of all they suggested or might mean—of life's great possibility lost to him, away back in the sorrowful past, as she also, perhaps was missing it—relinquishing it—now.
She knew not that his thought had been utterly self-forgetful. She believed that he had told her, indirectly, of himself, when he had spoken those dreary syllables—"the game is changed. Its soul is gone!"