There was a faint response as of relief and acquiescence.
Then, as Anna still held the limp, unresisting, unresponding hand and looked tenderly in the grey, changed face, Sarah Burgess spoke once more. Broken and falteringly came the words:—
“I am ... sorry ... you have ... no child,” and, as she spoke, large, slow tears rolled down her face.
It was the first time in all their intercourse that she had opened her heart to Anna in motherly pity. Perhaps she could not before, the defences of pride and reserve were sunk too deep. But the few words, the tears, the glimpse of a heart which, whatever its hardness, itself knew the passion of motherhood and could understand her pain, broke down for the younger woman the last remaining barriers which had stood between these two who had lived together so coldly. Anna laid her head on the pillow and kissed the face of the dying woman again and again, their tears mingling, while pity and tenderness overflowed the coldness and all the silent resentments of the past.
Two days later Madam Burgess died, not having spoken again, although she had plainly recognized Keith and watched him with wistful eyes.
The burial and the various incidents connected with the close of a long life, and one of social eminence, over, Keith and Anna turned back to the home, now wholly their own, and looked about them wondering what was in the future. Like all men and women of gentle will, they blotted out, at once and forever, every impression of unworthiness or selfishness which their dead had ever made upon them. They idealized her narrow character, and loved her better than they ever had, perhaps, in life; but underneath all this dutiful loyalty Anna found in her own heart a recognition of great release, and at times, in spite of her will, her pulses would bound and leap with the sense of new possibilities in life for them both.
Just what these possibilities might be was by no means clear to Anna, nor how far Keith would sympathize with her own vague but dominant desires for a return in some sort to the working motives which had swayed their earlier lives. She was greatly encouraged by the response which she received to her timid approach to the subject of some slight changes in their outward method of life in favour of simpler and more democratic habits. The horses and carriage and liveried servants had long been a source of distress to Anna’s conscience, as marks of a privileged and separate class. She had always avoided employing them as far as was possible. She had never, since she had begun reading the social essays of Gregory, driven in the family carriage without longing to apologize to every working man and woman whose glance rested upon her, for a luxury which she felt to be in their eyes divisive, while all the time her heart was crying out for brotherhood and burden-sharing with the lowliest and most oppressed among them.
Somewhat to her surprise she found that Keith was not without a similar consciousness, any expression of which, even to Anna, he had scrupulously avoided in his mother’s lifetime. Finding herself met here, and thus emboldened, Anna came to her husband one evening with a question which involved serious doubt and difficulty for her. It was two months since the death of Madam Burgess, and Anna was to start the following morning for Vermont for a visit of several weeks to her mother and Lucia. Keith was too busy with the details of settling his mother’s estate to accompany her, but it had been planned that he should meet her in Burlington on her return, late in May, and together with her make a visit, long-promised and long-postponed, at the Ingrahams’, whose friendship for them both had remained unchanged by the years.
And now the postman had brought Anna a note from Mrs. Ingraham which took her back strangely to her girlhood, and to one March night when she had first received a like request from the same source. This note asked her to come, when she came for the promised visit, prepared to give a missionary address at a meeting which would take place at that time in Burlington.
Anna handed the note to her husband, and, as he finished the perusal of it, she said hesitatingly:—