“We can’t find your grandmother!” said Aunt Lorena to me, showing her white face at the head of the stairs. With that it flashed through me at once that she had escaped by the side door. I flung off my motor coat and ran for the coat room and through the door into the garden. There, sure enough, by the narrow brick terrace was the imprint of her little shoe.
“Come, Keefe, come,” I called, for I felt there was great trouble ahead, and I wanted him to be with me, Carin. Yes, I can tell you, my dear, to whom every event, almost every feeling of my life, is known, that I wanted him above everyone else in the world.
It was almost dark by this time, and the two of us ran out, hand in hand, and down the gray garden in the mist. Nothing looked natural to me. The very shrubbery, wreathed all in white as it was, frightened me. The bushes looked like strange, unheard-of beasts, crouching to spring. And the whole place was so terribly still! I could feel my breath catching in my throat and strangling me.
“It is at the end of the garden she goes to meet him,” I managed to say through my throat.
“To meet whom?” asked Keefe. (I never had told him the story of my father.)
“Her dead son,” I gasped, and said no more. For how could I explain then? Keefe looked at me as if he thought I was out of my head, but I said nothing, and we ran on.
And then we came to the pool—the little sweet pool that is like the heart of the garden. The three swans were close to the shore looking at something dark that lay there.
And it was she, Carin. It was little madam grandmother. She had fallen with her face in the water, and it seemed as if she had not even tried to rise.
Keefe saw her and sprang to her and picked her up in his arms, and I came and looked at her.
“She has gone where she wished to go,” said Keefe. “She is with her son.”