"Poil, my baby! Max!"
"I love you, Pearlie girlie. Ever since we been in the same hotel together, when I seen you every day fresh like a flower and so fine, I—I been heels over head in love with you, Pearlie. You should know how my father and my married brothers tease me. I—I love you, Pearlie—"
She relaxed to his approaching arms, and let her head fall back to his shoulder so that her face, upturned to his, was like a dark flower, and he kissed her where the tears lay wet on her petal-smooth cheeks and on her lips that trembled.
"Max!"
"My little girlie!"
Mrs. Binswanger groped through tear-blinded eyes.
"This—this—ain't no place for a—old woman, children—this—this—ach, what I'm sayin' I don't know! Like in a dream I feel."
"Me, too, mamma; me, too. Like a dream. Ah, Max!"
"I tiptoe in and surprise papa, children. I surprise papa. Ach, my children, my children, like in a dream I feel."
She smiled at them with the tears streaming from her face like rain down a window-pane, opened the door to the room adjoining gently, and closed it more gently behind her. Her face was bathed in a peace that swam deep in her eyes like reflected moonlight trailing down on a lagoon, her lips trembled in the hysteria of too many emotions. She held the silence for a moment, and remained with her wide back to the door, peering across the dim-lit room at the curve-backed outline of her husband's figure, hunched in a sitting posture on the side of the bed.