He dropped his glance as if he felt it an intrusion to see her bitter emotion, and said softly: “I think I understand. You need not apologize.”
“After the war,” she went on hurriedly and abruptly, “I lived for my daughter. I worked for her. She—she was like her father.”
She choked, but regained the appearance of composure by a mighty effort.
“When she was a woman—she was still a child to me; over twenty, but I was not twice her age—she went North, and there she fell in love. She wrote me that she was to marry a Northerner, and when she added his name—it was the son of the man who killed her father.”
“It is not possible!” the other exclaimed. “You imagined it. Such things happen in melodramas—”
She put up her hand and arrested his words.
“This happened not in a melodrama, but in a tragedy—in my life,” she said. “I need not go into details. She married him, and I have never seen her since.”
“Did he know?”
“No. It was my wedding gift to my daughter—that I kept her secret. That was all I had strength to do. You think I was an unnatural mother, of course; but—”
She saw that his eyes were moist as he raised them in answering.