She opened it and held it out to me. I took it in my hand and carried it to the window, where there was still enough light by which to see it well.
Coiled up below the oval glass, faintly gold as thistle-down in sunshine, and fine as floss-silk, there was a baby’s curl.
“That was the very first curl I ever cut from Billy, the day that he was christened,” his mother told me softly, sitting on the side of my bed, while I stood, not knowing how to speak to her, by the window. “He had such pretty hair always!” she went on, “quite as pretty as Theo’s is now. Only boys—men always seem to look upon curly hair as a sort of affliction; they’re never satisfied unless they’re flattening it out with brushes and horrid stuff out of bottles, are they? And when we all go back to Sevenoaks again, Nancy—”
I lifted my head to try to interrupt her, to say something about my being forced to go away before, but no words came; she went on talking, as if more to herself than to anyone else, of what seemed, just then, almost unbearable to me.
—“I’ll show you heaps of other little things that belonged to him as a baby. His very first tiny shirt! They put new babies into shirts then, you know. Fine linen, with narrow, real lace round the neck and the little sleeves.... Oh, of course I know those silk-and-wool vests they have now are much more sensible. I’m quite modern, really. Still—there’s a lovely embroidered christening-robe of his ... all his robes. I made others for Blanche and Theo. I’d a fancy to keep them all separate, so that when they—my babies!—grew up and married they could have them handed on. So all Billy’s will be for you, Nancy—and the little locket. I knew you’d care to keep it.”
“I?” I cried, aghast and huskily. I held it back to her. “Oh, no! It’s not for me!”
“Of course it is. I always meant to give it to his bride on her wedding-morning.”
“Then you keep it for—for her, until then,” I broke in, with a little laugh that sounded wild in my own ears, and I pressed the pendant with the christening-day curl back into his mother’s hand. She said nothing for a moment.
Presently, in the dusk, I felt her long arm slip round me, and her hesitating, gentle voice was saying very earnestly and pitifully: “Nancy! You do care for my boy, don’t you?”