"I've wanted to come ever since I saw you for the first time after my return," he answered cheerfully. "It is strange, isn't it?—that I hardly remember you when I lived here. You were always ill, were you not?"
"Yes, ill almost always," she replied, smiling as she met his glance. "When you were married I remember I couldn't go to the wedding because I had been in bed for three months. But that's all over now," she added, fearing to produce in him a momentary depression. "I am well again, you see, so the past doesn't matter."
"The past doesn't matter," he repeated in a low voice, struck by the words as if they held more than their surface meaning for his ears.
She nodded gravely. "How can it matter if one is really happy at last."
"And you are happy at last?"
As he watched her it seemed to him that a pale flame burned in her face, tinging its sallow wanness with a golden light. "I am at peace and is that not happiness?" she asked.
"But you were sad once—that day in the cemetery? I felt it."
"That was while I was still struggling," she answered, "and it always hurts one to struggle. I wanted happiness—I kept on wanting it even after I ceased to believe in its existence. I fought very hard—oh, desperately hard—but now I have learned that the only way to get anything is to give it up. Happiness is like everything else, it is only when one gives it back to God that one really possesses it."
He had never seen a face in which the soul spoke so clearly, and her look rather than her words came to him like the touch of divine healing.
"When I saw you standing beside your father's grave, I knew that you were just where I had been for so many years—that you were still telling your self that things were too hard, that they were unendurable. I had been through it all, you see, so I understood."