And so the winter went flying by. Twice, letters came—from him; and Mary Alice answered them, giving the answers to Godmother to send. Once he wrote from London, and once from somewhere on the Bosphorus. They were lonesome letters, both; but he didn't ask for the Secret, though he mentioned it each time.
IX
TELLING THE SECRET TO MOTHER
In March, Godmother said: "I am going abroad for the summer, dear, and I've just had a conference with my man of affairs. He reports some unexpectedly good dividends from my small handful of stock in a company that is enjoying a boom, and so if we're careful—you and I—there will be enough so I can take you with me." Mary Alice was too surprised, too happy to speak. "Now, you'll want to go home, of course," Godmother went on, "and so we'll agree on a sailing date and then you may fly back to mother as soon as you wish, and stay till it's time to go abroad."
They decided to sail the first of May; so Mary Alice went home almost immediately, and on an evening late in March got off the train on to that familiar platform whence she had so fearfully set forth only four short months ago.
Father was at the station to meet her; and at home, by the soft-coal fire burning beneath the white marble mantel in the sitting-room, Mother was sewing and waiting for her.
Mary Alice was thinking, as she and Father neared the house, of that miserable evening in the fall when she had stolen past her mother and gone up to her room and wept passionately, in the dark, because life had no enchantment for her. There would be no stealing past dear Mother now! For the Secret was for Mother, too—yes, very much indeed for Mother, as Mary Alice and Godmother had agreed in their wonderful "tucking in" talk the night before Mary Alice came away. All the way home, on the train, she had hardly been able to wait till she got to Mother with this beautiful new thing in her heart.
Perhaps Mother had dreaded her girl's home-coming, in a way, almost as much as she yearned for it. But if she had, Mary Alice never knew it; and if she had, Mother herself soon forgot it. For in all the twenty years of Mary Alice's life, her mother had never, it seemed, had so much of her girl as in the month that followed her home-coming. Hour after hour they worked about the house or sat before that grate fire in the unchanged sitting-room, and talked and talked and talked. Mary Alice told every little detail of those four months until her mother lived them over with her and the light and life of them animated her as they had animated Mary Alice.
Little by little, in that month, Mary Alice came at least to the beginning of a wonderful new understanding: came to see how parents—and godparents!—cease to have any particular future of their own and live in the futures of the young things they love. Mary Alice's bleak years had been bitter for her mother, too; perhaps bitterer than for her. And her new enchantment with life was like new blood in her mother's veins.