“It seems very wonderful,” the cool, interested voice said, a little more interested, if anything.
“It seems glorious!” broke in the mother-voice; and the throb in it beat upon Judith’s heart through the waves of air between them. Judith’s heart was throbbing, too.
“You can’t think how it ‘seems,’—you don’t know anything about it!” the earnest, tremulous voice went on. “How can anyone know who never had a little daughter?”
“I had one once.” The other voice now was soft and earnest.
“But she walked. Your little daughter walked. How can anyone know whose little daughter always walk—”
“She never walked.” It was very soft now, and the throb had crept into it that was in the mother-voice and in Judith’s heart. “I only had her a year.”
They were both mother-voices! Judith could not see, but she felt sure the two sat up a little nearer to each other and their hands touched.
“Oh!—then you can know,” the first voice said, after a tiny silence. “I will tell you all about it—there have only been a few I have wanted to tell. It has seemed almost too precious and—and—sacred.”
“I know,” the other said.
“But you must begin right at the beginning, with me—at the time when my little daughter was a year old, when the time came for her to learn to walk. That is where my story begins.”