Well, After All--

by Frank Frankfort Moore

But then she caught sight of herself in the looking-glass that hung above her escritoire. It seemed to her that all her hair had become grey—that her face had become all scarred with lines. She closed her eyes and had a vision of the slender girl to whom that love-name had been given. She had a vision of the sparkling eyes, the brown hair flung back when one long shining strand had escaped from the knot in which it had beer, tied, and fell down from her shoulder. She could see his eyes as he turned them upon her, when he had kissed and kissed that wonderful rivulet of hair, calling her by that love-name.

And now....

Ah, she was no longer a girl! The pet name which she had written so lightly no longer sat lightly upon her. Would not people think it grotesque for a woman past thirty to call herself by the name that had once seemed so charmingly appropriate when applied to a girl of twenty-three with a rivulet of golden brown hair flowing over her shoulders to meet a lover's kisses?

But then she recollected the story she had heard of the true lover who loved so well that the gods had given to him the greatest gift in their power—the gift of blindness, so that at the end of forty years when he and the woman he loved had grown old together, she still seemed to him the girl she had been on the first day that he had seen and loved her.

There would be nothing grotesque in that lover calling his wife by the love-name of her-youth. But would such love blindness be given to Claude, so that he should still think of her as the slim girl with the loose hair?

Alas! Alas! He might tolerate the letter signed as she had signed it, but in a few months he would be face to face with her, and would he not see that she was no longer a girl?

Only for a moment she paused as that melancholy question passed through her mind. Then she flung down the letter, crying:

“I will trust him. I will trust him as I have trusted him hitherto. He will love me better, better, better, seeing that it was the years of waiting for him that gave me the grey hairs where only brown had been.”

It never occurred to her to ask herself if it was not possible that the years which had given her half a dozen grey hairs, had brought about quite as great a change in her lover. It never occurred to her to think that there was a possibility that the years spent among savages—wandering through the forests where malaria lurked—starving at times and in peril of beasts and reptiles and lightning and sunstroke every day of his life, had changed him in some measure—even in as great a measure as the years of watching and waiting had altered her.

His portrait stood by her side day and night. Every day and every night she had kissed that picture of the young cavalry officer that smiled out at her from the frame. That was the portrait of her lover, and never for a moment did she think of him as otherwise than that portrait revealed him to her.