“I took her for that poor, dead child’s sake,” returned Miss Amory.
“For——” Baird began.
“For Margery’s sake,” put in Miss Amory. “Margery Latimer. When Susan was in trouble the child was a tender little angel to her. Lord! what a pure little heart it was!”
“As pure as young Eve’s in the Garden of Eden—as pure as young Eve’s,” murmured Baird.
“Just that!” said Miss Amory, rather sharply. “How do you know it?” And she turned and looked at him. “You have heard her brother say a good deal of her.”
“Yes, yes,” Baird answered. “She seems to have been the life of him.”
“Well, well!” with emotional abruptness. “I took this girl for her sake. Her short life was not wasted if another’s is built upon it. That’s one of my fantastic fancies, I suppose. Stop a minute.”
The old woman paused a few moments on the garden walk and turned her face upward to look at the blue height and expanse of sky. There was a shade of desperate appeal or question on her uplifted, rugged countenance.
“When the world gets too much for me,” she said, “and I lose my patience with the senselessness of the tragedy of it, I get a sort of courage from looking up like this—into the height and the still, clear blueness. It sends no answer back to me—that my human brain can understand—but it makes me feel that perhaps there is no earth at all. I get out of it and away.”
“I know—I know—though I am not like you,” Baird said, slowly.