"You didn't have to tell me—in words," she laughed. "You told me in a hundred other ways, that were just as plain."
"Then the only part of my story," I said, a little crest-fallen, "which is new to you is the information that you were a goddess and I a high priest, out there in the South Seas?"
"Oh, that wasn't new at all," she ruthlessly enlightened, "I knew that, too."
"Is there anything you don't know?" I inquired. "What gift of prophetic vision—"
"There wasn't any vision about it," she interrupted. "I got a letter from Mrs. Keller the day before you reached Kentucky. I guess when you get back to New York you'll find one from the captain. His wife wrote to tell me you were coming. That was why I got a headache and stayed at home that night."
She laid her hand on my forearm. My sleeves were uprolled to the elbows.
"Dearest," she exclaimed in sudden anxiety, "you're cold!" I suppose I was, but I had not known it.
It has been some time now since I have written in the diary which had its birth under such strange circumstances. The narrative went into a pigeon-hole because I have been too busy living to think of reflecting upon life. It was a device for moments of emptiness and in later times also for moments of extraordinary jubilation, but since the last pages were scribbled there has been enough of celebration in merely living out the days. Yet now I must add a postscript, so that some time He may have the full record before him. He is my little son.
He is teaching me a great many things and finding in me a willing pupil. When I first walked out into the public ways after his entrance to the stage whereon I hope he will be cast in a worthy part, I walked differently. I walked with the pride of an emperor. Not the pride of arrogance. I needed no car of ivory and bronze with captives marching fettered at its wheel. I needed no slave to whisper in my ear, "Remember, Cæsar, thou art but a man." I was filled with a new graciousness and wished to be generously courteous to all men, yet that desire was born of a sense of vast superiority. I had found the meaning of life; the secret of which the gulls shrieked in mating-time around the rocks of the island—though then my ears were deaf to its significance.