When his mother did not answer, he crept closer and, laying his head against her arm, said wistfully:
“Mamma, will my papa ever come back to us?”
“I don’t know, Jack,” she answered quietly. “Perhaps. If he don’t, you shall go and see him when you are a big boy. Now run away, and leave mamma a chance to think for a whole ten minutes.”
The child ran off to the horses, and Elizabeth faced the life she led. A curious thing was made plain to her in that hour—namely, that Hugh, whom she remembered tenderly, was but a memory, while John Hunter, the father of her child, whom she had no other cause to love, was a living force in her life, and that at the child’s simple question a longing flamed up, and a feeling that she wished he were there. She remembered him as he would ride with his hat in his hand, his fair, soft hair wind-blown about his temples, and she would have been glad to go forth to meet him and try anew to build a life together which would be livable to both.
A long time she pondered, and the impulse to write to him came over her, but that impulse was followed by retrospection, and as one thing after another arose out of the past in solemn procession, closing with the unloved and unwished-for child which she had lost five years ago, she knew that she would not open a correspondence. At that point, and with the memory of the sweltering day and the unnecessary churning, her tender memory of Hugh, who had made her free and economically independent, welled up in her in one glad tide of thanksgiving, and she thought of her mother and the thousands of other women on these Kansas prairies who had not been saved from such a fate by being made independent landowners, and she pondered on their fate till she longed for a way out for all women who were mothers.
“This income could have set John free too, if he would only have thought it over,” she said to herself. “He need not have been burdened with us while he was getting his depths in the business world,” she concluded.
Wherever Elizabeth’s thoughts turned to-day, John was the centre of them. Elizabeth had never been resentful toward her husband, and the never-ceasing cause of speculation and comment in the neighbourhood had been upon the fact that though she lived apart from him, she never seemed to think of divorce. Elizabeth’s attitude toward John was that of a mother who waits for a child to find the real light on a situation. She rarely heard from him, and never directly. She knew of some of his affairs through Doctor Morgan, with whom John corresponded when business required, but she wrote regularly to Mrs. Hunter, who had gone to her son the second year he had been away, and who had written to her at that time. Elizabeth had been glad of so simple a means of keeping the link unbroken between him and his child. It had been no part of her plan to separate Jack from his father. She would not ask John to return, but she wished him to have such knowledge of his son as his temper would permit. She wrote such details of the home and the child as would interest them, knowing that John would read the letters. Somehow, to-day she wished that she could write to him direct, but as she thought she shook her head.
“It cannot be,” she said aloud.
“Mamma, if you don’t come we won’t have time to go for the mail,” Jack called.
The pleasant afternoon had waned; Elizabeth Hunter gazed about her in astonishment; it was indeed late.