“There was another house as well,” she said presently, still staring,—“a house you and me know of, as isn’t built yet, but will be, before long....”
“Yes, yes! Yes, yes!”
“And between the houses there was that garden they talk so much about,—a great big stretch of a place as seemed to go on for ever and ever.”
He did not say anything to that, for the simple reason that he was no longer present to say it. He was There now, just as she had been There, all during those night-hours when he had lain awake and she had slept so sweetly. The garden had taken him, as he had known it would take him, if she began to speak of it. He could fight against all the rest,—the houses and their occupants, even that other house which was going to be so important, although it was not yet even built; but he could not fight the garden. The very mention of it was sufficient to drag him out of the safe place in which he had lived so long, and to carry him overseas.
“It was all just as we thought,” Mattie was saying again,—“only a deal bigger.” She had forgotten her tea, for the time being, and her gaze at the quilt seemed not so much to be seeing pictures upon it as to pierce through it and beyond. “There was that much room,—more room than I’d ever thought there was in the whole world! Even the sky seemed bigger and higher than our sky over here.” She drew a deep breath, as if even in imagination it was a delight to fill her lungs under that higher and wider sky.... “The children were there and all,” she went on, after a pause, her voice softening. “You’ll hardly believe it, but I knew ’em as well as well, even though I’ve never seen no more of ’em than just their photos! There was Luke’s Joe, and Joe’s Luke, and little Sally, and Daisy May; little Eric, too ... and Maggie’s last, as hasn’t done as well as it should.... I couldn’t have known them better if I’d brought them up myself! And the queerest thing of all was that they knew me!... Just before I woke up I told ’em I’d got to go, and they set to and cried fit to break their hearts.”
“It was only a dream,” he tried to console her, speaking with an effort as if from a great distance.
“Yes, but it wasn’t like dreaming; it was like being!” she said quickly, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears. “It was that real!”
He came back then from his leap across the ocean, and, reaching out his hand, patted her on the shoulder.
“It’ll be real enough soon,” he reminded her gently. “It’s only a matter of being patient a few weeks more.”
“Only a few weeks, that’s all,” she repeated after him in a curiously childlike fashion, heartening herself both with the words and with a sip of the cooling tea. “But it’s a long while, all the same.... Seems strange, doesn’t it, you should feel as if you couldn’t wait a few more weeks, when you’ve waited for years and years?”