“I don’t know—I wish I did! What I’m trying to do, of course,” she added abruptly and unguardedly, “is to guess how I should feel about all these young men—if I were Anne.”
She was vexed with herself that the words should have slipped out, and yet not altogether sorry. After all, one could always trust Landers to hold his tongue—and almost always to understand. His smile showed that he understood now.
“Of course you’re trying; we all are. But, as far as I know, Sister Anne hasn’t yet seen any one from her tower.”
A breath of relief expanded the mother’s heart.
“Ah, well, you’d be sure to know—especially as, when she does, it ought to be some one visible a long way off!”
“It ought to be, yes. The more so as she seems to be in no hurry.” He looked away. “But don’t build too much on that,” he added. “I learned long ago, in such matters, to expect only the unexpected.”
Kate Clephane glanced at him quickly; his ingenuous countenance wore an unaccustomed shadow. She remembered that, in old days, John Clephane had always jokingly declared—in a tone proclaiming the matter to be one mentionable only as a joke—that Fred Landers was in love with her; and she said to herself that the lesson her old friend referred to was perhaps the one she had unwittingly given him when she went away with another man.
It was on the tip of her tongue to exclaim: “Oh, but I didn’t know anything then—I wasn’t anybody! My real life, my only life, began years later—” but she checked herself with a start. Why, in the very act of thinking of her daughter, had she suddenly strayed away into thinking of Chris? It was the first time it had happened to her to confront the two images, and she felt as if she had committed a sort of profanation.
She took refuge in another thought that Landers’s last words had suggested—the thought that if she herself had matured late, why so might Anne. The idea was faintly reassuring.
“No; I won’t build on any theory,” she said, answering him. “But one can’t help hoping she’ll wait till some one turns up good enough for what she’s going to be.”