"When you speak of how small your experience has been, Louise," said Blythe, a symptom of a smile flickering around his eyes, "I am revisited by a kind of self-condemnation that I have known ever since I became aware that I loved you. Even now I wonder if I am really guilty of having pounced upon you, when you were barely out of school, and before you had your rightful chance to enslave and then appraise your cluster of suitors—"
Louise, smiling, placed a hand upon his arm.
"Please don't continue that," she said. "All the 'clusters of suitors' in the world would have made no difference to me. Always, I think, John, I should have been gazing beyond them—if they had appeared, which of course is merely your polite assumption—to see your face. And then the poor 'enslaved' ones would have disappeared in a sudden mist, and I should have seen only you."
Hands resting upon steamer rails may be furtively pressed, no matter how many deck strollers there may be.
"How royally you grant absolution!" said Blythe. "But, for all that, it is not as a sister confessor alone that I need you. If now you have made the path so clear for me, then it is your own fault, heart of dreams. It is as wife, mate of me, that I need you—and shall have you."
Wife and mate of the man beloved! They were new words—even expressing a new thought—to Louise, and they sang tumultuously in her heart.
Mrs. Treharne, very white and with the spiritual delicacy of an illness already far-advanced upon her features, was propped up in bed, gazing with a sort of vacant wonderment at her almost transparent hands, which she held up to the light, when the faithful Heloise entered the room with Louise's wireless message from the Mauretania. She read it eagerly and then suffered the message to flutter from her fingers to the coverlet.
"My little girl will be here day after tomorrow morning," she said to the maid, smiling wanly with the happiness of it. "Do you think she will know her mother, Heloise?"
"Know you, madame?" said the maid, half grumblingly, half soothingly, as she raised her mistress and patted the pillows. "Madame must not be morbid. The doctor said that. I, too, say it. Why should not Mademoiselle Louise know her mother?"