"No, your mother was no coward," she said with conviction. "But she was a very unhappy woman. And Archie—she was a lady!" The look of race seemed to her unmistakable.
He drew a great breath. "I think so, too," he said gladly, "I've always thought so. That's how I dared—" Suddenly, passionately, he drew her up into his arms. "Oh, my Joan, do you see why I wanted you here in my own home? It's all the home I've ever had. Anything that's happened to me has happened here. I've lain here at night trying to be a man when I was nothing more than a kid. I've sat here listening, listening—Oh, for years I used to think I heard my mother coming up the stairs to get me, long after I was old enough to know she never would! And sometimes I thought—Do you believe in ghosts?"
"Yes!" said Joan. "Ghosts of people that love us and want to help—"
"That's what I mean! And that's why I wanted to stay on in this room, where—she could find me. It's a horrible thing not to belong anywhere, nor to any one, like any little fyst dog in the streets. I've never said this before—"
"I know!" whispered Joan.
"And now that I do belong to some one, I wanted my room to know it. I wanted—in case there were any ghosts—"
"I know," whispered Joan again, her lips against his.
There was a taste of salt on them, and she held him close and closer, this great, lonely child who should never be lonely again. If, as she had warned him, she was not capable of offering deep love, Joan could at least offer deep understanding, which perhaps is rarer....
And presently as she held him so in the quiet of his old room, with the house settling into drowsiness about them, and the sycamore tapping its friendly signal on the roof close above their heads, Joan's identity seemed to be slipping, merging, into that of some one else. She ceased to be Joan the girl. She felt, in that strange moment of transition, partly the wife, and partly the mother; but most of all the woman, whose mission is to give.