“That my boy will never be content with a mere picture of her,” she interrupted.
“Mother, you’re a wizard,” he declared.
“Not I,” she answered almost a bit sadly. “It is she who is now the wizard.”
“It is her eyes,” he exclaimed. “Her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her chin, her hair—her soul.”
She gently patted his arm still without looking at him. Her own eyes had grown wistful as though in fixing her gaze upon the sunshine which sprinkled through the leaf-shadows she was bidding something good-by.
“Tell me from the first day, Dick,” she murmured.
So he began with the sobbing by the letter-box and took her hour by hour through the events of the succeeding days, trying hard to make her see as vividly as possible every detail of them. But when he had concluded, she had clearly in her mind but one picture—that of a young woman painted in a bewildering combination of black and gold and damson preserves. And this woman met her eyes with something of a challenge. She continued to pat her son’s arm silently and very gently.
“So there she stands,” he ran on, “and every path in this old park seems to lead to her.”
He did not notice the quick flash in his mother’s eyes, followed by a deepened look of patient resignation. He did not know that he was hurting her. He did not know that he was making this park a foreign place to her.
He lowered his voice.