She stood alone.
This time she did not wait. Where was the good of waiting?
She turned and walked slowly up the lawn, pausing to look at the flowers in the border. The yellow roses still looked golden. The jolly little "what-d'-you-call-'ems" lifted pale purple faces to the sky.
But the Boy was gone.
She reached her chair, where he had placed it, deep in the shade of the mulberry-tree. She felt tired; worn-out; old.
The Boy was gone.
She leaned back with closed eyes. She had hurt him so. She remembered all the glad, sweet confident things he had said each day. Now she had hurt him so.... What radiant faith, in love and in life, had been his. But she had spoiled that faith, and dimmed that brightness.
Suddenly she remembered his dead mother's prayer for him. "I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not." And under those words she had written "Christobel." Would he want to obliterate that name? No, she knew he would not. Nothing approaching a hard or a bitter thought could ever find a place in his heart. It would always be the golden heart of her little Boy Blue.
Tears forced their way beneath her closed lashes, and rolled slowly down her cheeks.
"Oh, Boy dear," she said aloud, "I love you so—I love you so!"