Rupert saw that she was unconsciously trying to explain something to herself, and he interposed between her and her thoughts with a hurried effort.
“Yes, yes,” he said; “it must be so. When they love each other and one is taken, how can the other bear it?”
Then she lifted her eyes from the flowers to his again, and they looked very large and bright.
“You see,” she said, in an unsteady little voice, “I had only been alive a few hours when he went away.”
Suddenly the brightness in her eyes welled up and fell in two large crystal drops, though a smile quivered on her lips.
“Don’t tell Uncle Tom,” she said; “I never let him know that it—it hurts my feelings when I think I had only been alive such a few hours—and there was nobody to care. I must have been so little. If—if there had been no Uncle Tom——”
He knelt down by her side and took her hand in his.
“But there was,” he said; “there was!”
“Yes,” she answered, her sweet face trembling with emotion; “and, oh! I love him so! I love him so!”
She put her free hand on the earth among the white flowers on the mound.