"And I think you are dearer to the commander's heart than any other man," she added. "Indeed, he told me so. For he stayed here with you for three days, watching at your bedside, until he found that he could stay no longer, and then he tore himself away as a father leaves his child. I had never seen him moved so deeply, for you know he rarely shows emotion."
Ah, Dorothy, you did not know him as did I! You had not been with him at Great Meadows, nor beside the Monongahela, nor when we buried Braddock there in the road in the early morning. You had not been with him at Winchester when wives cried to him for their husbands, and children for their parents, nor beside the desolated hearths of a hundred frontier families. And of a sudden it came over me as a wave rolls up the beach, how much of sorrow and how little of joy had been this man's portion. Small wonder that his face seemed always sad and that he rarely smiled.
Dorothy had left me alone a moment with my thoughts, and when she came back, she brought her mother with her. I had never seen her look at me as she looked now, and for the first time perceived that it was from her Dorothy got her eyes. She stood in the doorway for a moment, gazing down at me, and then, before I knew what she was doing, had fallen on her knees beside my bed and was kissing my bandaged hand.
"Why, aunt!" I cried, and would have drawn it from her.
"Oh, Tom," she sobbed, and clung to it, "can you forgive me?"
"Forgive you, aunt?" I cried again, yet more amazed. "What have you done that you should stand in need of my forgiveness?"
"What have I done?" she asked, and raised her face to mine. "What have I not done, rather? I have been a cold, hard woman, Tom. I have forgot what right and justice and honor were. But I shall forget no longer. Do you know what I have here in my breast?" she cried, and she snatched forth a paper and held it before my eyes. "You could never guess. It is a letter you wrote to me."
"A letter I wrote to you?" I repeated, and then as I saw the superscription, I felt my cheeks grow hot. For it read, "To be delivered at once to Mrs. Stewart."
"Ay," she said, "a letter you wrote to me, and which I should never have received had you not forgot it and left it lying on my table in my study at Riverview. Can you guess what I felt, Tom, when they brought it to me here, and I opened it and read that you had gone to the swamp alone amongst those devils? I thought that you were dead, since the letter had been delivered, and the whole extent of the wrong I had done you sprang up before me. But they told me you were not dead,—that Colonel Washington had come for you, and that you had ridden hastily away with him. I could guess the story, and I should never have known that you had saved the place but for the chance which made you forget this letter."
I had tried to stop her more than once. She had gone on without heeding me, but now she paused.