"He has been here and gone," replied her mother, discerning what was in Louise's mind. "But there is no need for you to see him privately, daughter. Your little mother will tell you, for you have shown how brave you can be. I am quite as ill as you suppose me to be, Louise, and entirely beyond the help of medical men. Cry, dear, if you feel like it; I shall not mind; and there are times when tears do help one."
Louise, yielding at last, knelt beside the bed and buried her face on her mother's shoulder in an agony of quiet weeping, while her mother stroked her hair and murmured phrases of endearment that had not visited her lips since Louise had been a child.
"Take heart, girl of mine," she said after a while, when she observed that Louise's sobs were gradually abating. "I am resigned. It was to be—but I shall not distract you with phrases of that kind, which, after all, are not so consoling as they are supposed to be. I am glad that I have lived to know and to understand and to appreciate so fine and sweet a daughter as I have. And, Louise: listen."
"Yes, mother: I am listening."
"It is a gift of God, I know, that I have a daughter who, when my very soul was in peril, regenerated, recreated me. You have done that for me. I confess it without shame. My little girl summoned me, raised me from the depths. Thank God I answered the summons before I knew that my life was slipping away from me, so that I am at least open to no charge of hypocrisy or of repenting in mere grovelling fear of the judgment. My little Louise, grown to sweet, serene, pure womanhood, did this thing for me. It is something to have brought your mother to the foot of the Cross, my dear; and that knowledge, I know, will ennoble and exalt you during all the years that are to come."
When Heloise entered the room, hours later, she found her mistress asleep, and Louise's head still pillowed upon her mother's breast.
CHAPTER XVI
A tall, bronzed man, erect and broad of shoulder, strode slowly, meditatively, hands clasped behind him, back and forth on the wide porch of a rambling, palm-shaded one-story Hawaiian bungalow. He had the unlined countenance of a man of forty-five who had lived most of his life in the open; but his silvered, almost white, hair and mustache, might well have given at first glance, the impression that he was older.
He was clad in white linen, although it was the day before Christmas. December in Hawaii! There is nothing in the whole world to compare with it. The sun shone in serene splendor from a cloudless sky of the intensest indigo. The fronds of the towering palms stirred with a soothing sibilance under the light touch of fragrant whispering zephyrs. Surrounding the bungalow were many unfenced acres rioting in the myriad hued flowers of the tropics; thence, from where the welter of blossoms ceased, on all sides, as far as the eye could see, stretched miles of sugar-cane in growing, with its unmatchable tint of young, tender yet vivid green. It was the Island of Maui; and Maui, next to the main Island of Hawaii, is the most beautiful of all the sugar-cane islands in the world.