"Well, I left the Islands, and there is no need to trouble you with my own story—though some day I will tell it if you care to hear. It contains a great deal of hard work, much good fortune, some suffering, too; and on the whole I am a very grateful woman, as I ought to be.... But we were talking of Ruth. She married, as she was born to marry, and her husband is a good man. She has children, and her letters are full of their sayings and doings, as a happy mother's should be. So, you see, our instinct was wise, and I did well to depart."
The Commandant considered this for a moment before answering: for her tone conveyed a question, almost a challenge.
"You were wise, perhaps, to go. But why in all these years have you never come back?"
She looked at him earnestly, and nodded. "Yes," she said, "I was afraid you would ask that; and yet I am glad, for it forces me to make confession, and I shall feel better to get it over.... Ruth loves me still, you see; but, of course, her husband comes first, and after her husband—if not sometimes before him—her children. That is as it should be, of course."
"Of course," the Commandant echoed.
"And of course I foresaw it. Remember, please, that I foresaw it before ever there was a question of young Tregarthen; so that my jealousy, if you are going to laugh at it, had nothing to do——"
"I am not in the least inclined to laugh."
"Thank you. We were not as ordinary sisters, you see, and ... and there is another thing I must tell you," she went on with a brisk change of tone. "Though Ruth and I have always written regularly, there is one thing I have always kept hidden from her—I mean my success, as you will call it. At first this wasn't deliberate at all.... A great chance came to me, a chance so good that I could hardly believe—yes, so incredible even to me, that I dared not talk of it, but walked humbly, and taught myself to think of it as a dream from which I must awake, and awake to find people laughing at my hopes. I hid it even from Ruth.... Afterwards, when the dream had become a certainty, it seemed yet harder to tell her. I had concealed so much, and to tell her now seemed like triumphing over her—so full her letters were of simple things and of her happiness in them. I was afraid my news would overawe her, would change her in some way; that she would think me some grand person, and not the sister to whom she had told all her mind—not, you must understand, that Ruth could be envious if she tried. But have you never seen how, when a man grows rich or powerful suddenly, his old friends, the best of them, draw away from him, not in envy at all, but just because they feel he has been taken from them?"
"Yes," said the Commandant, "I have seen such cases."
"And I wanted still to be Vazzy to her—even though I must come after husband and children."