Bertha drew a quick breath, there was a second or so of silence, and then she stirred.
"It is over," she said; "and it has been like watching some one die, only sadder."
She took up the little work-basket and rose from her seat.
"It seems a pity to speak of mundane things," she said; "but I think we must go in to tea."
When the children were taken upstairs for the night Bertha went with them. It had been her habit to do this during their sojourn in the country, and naturally Janey had been her special care of late.
"I cannot often do such things when I am in Washington," she had explained once to Tredennis. "And I really like it as much as they do. It is part of the holiday."
As he sat on the porch in the starlight Tredennis could hear her voice mingling with the children's. The windows were wide open; she was moving from one room to the other, and two or three times she laughed in answer to some childish speech.
It was one of these laughs which, at last, caused Tredennis to leave his seat and go to the place under the trees where the hammocks were swung, and which was far more the place of general rendezvous than the parlor windows. From this point he could see the corner of the brightly lighted room, near the window where it was Bertha's custom to sit in her low chair, and rock Janey to sleep when she was restless.
She was doing it to-night. He could see the child's head lying on her bosom, and her own bent so that her cheek rested against the bright hair. In a few moments all was quiet, and she began to sing, and as she sang, swaying to and fro, Tredennis looked and listened without stirring.
But, though it was gay no longer, he liked to hear her song, and to his mind the moments in which he stood in the odorous dark, looking upward at the picture framed by the vine-hung window, were among the tenderest of the day. It was his fate to be full of a homely sentiment, which found its pleasure in unsophisticated primary virtues and affections. Any deep passion he might be moved by would necessarily have its foundation in such elements. He was slow at the subtle analysis whose final result is frequently to rob such simplicities of their value. His tendency was to reverence for age, tenderness to womanhood and childhood, faithfulness to all things. There was something boyish and quixotic in his readiness to kindle in defence of any womanly weakness or pain. Nothing he had ever said, or done, had so keenly touched and delighted Professor Herrick as his fiery denunciation, one night, of a man who was the hero of a scandalous story. There had been no qualifications of his sweeping assertion that in such cases it must be the man who had earned the right to bear the blame.