"Us! We! Home!" she repeated after him, with a smile of rather sad mockery. "Yes, I suppose I begin to see, Arthur."
"They've made it home to me—especially since my mother's death."
Her resentment passed away. She seemed tranquil now, but sad and regretful. "Yes, I suppose that's the way it'll work," she said. "I shall get farther and farther off, and they'll get nearer and nearer!" She laid her hand on his for a moment, with one of her old light affectionate caresses. "I was silly enough to think that I could keep you, Arthur, somehow, in spite of all that's happened. And I wanted to. Because I'm very fond of you. But I suppose I can't. I'm a spoilt child—to think I could have you as well as all the rest I've got!" She smiled. "Awfully thorough life is, isn't it? Always making you go the whole hog when you think you can go half-way, just comfortably half-way! I don't like it, Cousin Arthur."
"I don't like it either, altogether; but that is the kind of way it gets you," he agreed thoughtfully.
"Still we can be good friends," she said, and then broke away from the conventional words with a quick impatience. "Oh, being good friends is such a different thing from being really friends, though!" She took up her gloves and began to put them on slowly. "I had a letter from Judith just before I came over," she remarked. "She writes every three or four weeks, you know. She said you were down there, and that she and you were having a good time skating."
"Yes, awfully jolly. She's a champion, you know!"
Bernadette was busy with her gloves. She did not see the sudden lighting-up of his eyes, as her words recalled to him the vision of Judith skating, the vivid grace of motion and the triumph of activity, there on the ice down at Hilsey.
"Oh, well, she's been to Switzerland in the winter a lot," said Bernadette carelessly. "I suppose she'd have gone this year, if it hadn't been for—" She raised her eyes again to his, and stopped with a glove half-way on. "Well, if it hadn't been for me, really!" She smiled, and jerked her head impatiently. "How I seem to come in everywhere, don't I? Well, I can't help it! She's got no one else belonging to her, and she used to be a lot with us anyhow."
"Oh, you needn't worry about her; she's quite happy," said Arthur confidently.
"I don't know that I was worrying, though I daresay I ought to have been. But she likes being there. I expect she'll settle down there for good and all." As she went back to her glove-buttoning she added, by way of an after-thought, "Unless she marries."