“Once the sun was shining and we had been lying out on the bank with our arms under our heads and then he said—he confessed”—the child faltered, then looking at her directly and fixedly, said, “Bailey cried when he knew it was over——”
“What was over?”
“I asked him, and he answered, ‘I am a man now.’ Shall I cry, too, when I know that? What is it all about?”
Carmen la Tosca rose on her elbow and looked at him with suffused eyes as if she had been crying, but it was all an illusion.
“How many of you are there?”
“Three. A married brother.”
“And how old is he?”
“Twenty-four. He cried once, too, but differently, about his sweetheart. She died, you know, and when they told him he said, crying out, ‘I could have saved her.’ We asked him how, but he would not tell us, but he told mother; he said, ‘I would have said I love you.’ Is there such a power?”
Carmen la Tosca lay on her back, her hands beside her.
“That was innocence. We are all waiting for the day when people shall learn of our innocence, all over again,” she said brightly.