Well, life was like that. As for Edith and her children, he would be glad to have them here. Only, it would be different, the house would have to change again. He was sorry, too, for Deborah. No wedding trip as she had planned, no home awaiting her return.
So his mind went over his family.
But suddenly such thoughts fell away as trivial and of small account. For these people would still be alive. And Bruce was dead, and Roger was old. So he thought about Bruce and about himself, and all his children grew remote. "You will live on in our children's lives." Was there no other immortality? The clock ticked on the mantle and beside it "The Thinker" brooded down. And Roger looked up unafraid, but grim and gravely wondering.
CHAPTER XXII
But there was a rugged practical side to the character of Roger Gale, and the next morning he was ashamed of the brooding thoughts which had come in the night. He shook them off as morbid, and resolutely set himself to what lay close before him. There was work to be done on Bruce's affairs, and the work was a decided relief. Madge Deering, in the meantime, had offered to go with Edith and the children to the mountains and see them all well settled there. And a little talk he had with Madge relieved his mind still further. What a recovery she had made from the tragedy of years ago. How alert and wide-awake she seemed. If Edith could only grow like that.
Soon after their departure, one night when he was dining alone, he had a curious consciousness of the mingled presence of Edith and of Judith his wife. And this feeling grew so strong that several times he looked about in a startled, questioning manner. All at once his eye was caught by an old mahogany sideboard. It was Edith's. It had been her mother's. Edith, when she married, had wanted something from her old home. Well, now it was back in the family.
The rest of Edith's furniture, he learned from Deborah that night, had been stored in the top of the house.
"Most of it," she told him, "Edith will probably want to use in fitting up the children's rooms." With a twinge of foreboding, Roger felt the approaching change in his home.
"When do you plan to be married?" he asked.