For a moment the two held each other; then Mrs. Drover, beaming up to them, said benevolently: “Your mother must be awfully tired, Anne. Do carry her off to your own quarters for a quiet talk—” and dazed, trembling, half-fearing she was in a dream from which the waking would be worse than death, Mrs. Clephane found herself mounting the stairs with her daughter.
On the first landing she regained her senses, said to herself: “She thinks I’ve come to take back what I said,” and tried to stiffen her soul against this new form of anguish. Anne moved silently at her side. After the first cry and the first kiss she had drawn back into herself, perhaps obscurely conscious of some inward resistance in her mother. But when the bedroom door had closed on them she drew Mrs. Clephane down into an armchair, dropped on her knees beside it, and whispered: “Mother—how could you and I ever give each other up?”
The words sounded like an echo of the dear unuttered things the mother had heard said to herself long ago, in her endless dialogues with an invisible Anne. No tears rose to her eyes, but their flood seemed to fill her thirsty breast. She drew Anne’s head against it. “Anne ... little Anne....” Her fingers crept through the warm crinklings of hair, wound about the turn of the temples, and slipped down the cheeks. She shut her eyes, softly saying over her daughter’s name.
Anne was the first to speak. “I’ve been so unhappy. I wanted you so to come.”
“Darling, you were sure I would?”
“How could I tell? You seemed so angry.”
“With you? Never, child!”
There was a slight pause; then, raising herself, the girl slipped her arms about her mother’s neck.
“Nor with him, any longer?”
The chill of reality smote through Mrs. Clephane’s happy trance. She felt herself turning again into the desolate stranger who had stood below watching for Anne’s return.