"He talked about it yesterday. He feels it very much still."
"Poor Uncle Bill! But I've thought about it a lot, and I don't love him any less because of it. If he weren't sorry about it himself, I suppose it would make a difference. But I know he did love my darling Daddy; they loved one another underneath it all. They both knew it at the last. When father couldn't speak any more, and Uncle Bill took my hand in his, and said he would look after me and all of us, I could tell by the way he looked at him that that was what he wanted. Oh, they did love one another, I know. If only that quarrel hadn't come between them, almost at the last! Why do people quarrel who love one another?"
"I think that we ought not to make too much of it, Pam darling. I've thought about it too. It's because poor Uncle Edmund died that it seems so important. If he had lived they would have made it up. They couldn't have helped themselves, because of what they really were to one another. Then it would all have been forgotten very quickly; and I should think they would both have been careful that it shouldn't happen again."
"Yes, I dare say that's true. But it just shows that it doesn't do for people who love one another to let themselves quarrel at all. We never will, will we?"
They agreed upon that, and upon many other things. Then they walked slowly back to the Hall together, hand in hand part of the way. Miss Baldwin, from her watch tower of the schoolroom window, saw them under the trees before they came out on to the lawn as separate units. She had seen few signs of the emotion she had craved for between them, and to catch that glimpse of them together pleased her. It was the right ending of the story whose vicissitudes she had watched with such interest. Its later chapters had been sadder than she had anticipated, and her sympathies had of late been more human than literary with the family with whom she lived. But the shadow of loss seemed to be lifting, in these sunny spring days. It was not forbidden to her now to weave her tales around them. Already she scented another absorbing romance to unfold itself before her eyes. And with this one, the interest of which she might have expected to come to an end with the approaching pealing of wedding bells, she found herself still looking forward. For if you could take leave of the heroes and heroines of fiction at the church door, with no wish to follow their fortunes further, it was not so with those with whom you had come to feel a living sympathy. For them a new story was beginning, from which as much happiness was to be looked for as from the one that had led up to it.