The full moon rose before the sun had quite set, and I talked on and on. The others came in to dinner. She and I had some dinner brought to us out there, and on I talked—and she could scarcely eat for listening. I wrapped her well up, and lit pipe after pipe, and went on talking, and a nightingale sang, but quite unheard by Marty Josselin.
She did not even hear her sister Mary, whose voice went lightly up to heaven through the open window:
"Oh that we two were maying!"
"Oh that we two were maying!"
And when we parted that night she thanked and kissed me so effusively I felt that I had been happily inspired.
"I believe every word of it's true; I know it, I feel it! Uncle Bob, you have changed my life; I have often desponded when nobody knew—but never again! Dear papa! Only think of him! As if any human being alive could write what he has written without help from above or outside. Of course it's all true; I sometimes think I can almost remember things.... I'm sure I can."
Barty and Leah were well pleased with me when they came home that night.
That Marty was doomed to an early death did not very deeply distress them. It is astonishing how lightly they thought of death, these people for whom life seemed so full of joy; but that she should ever be conscious of the anguish of her lot while she lived was to them intolerable—a haunting preoccupation.
To me, a narrower and more selfish person, Marty had almost become to me life itself—her calamity had made her mine forever; and life without her had become a thing not to be conceived: her life was my life.
That life of hers was to be even shorter than we thought, and I love to think that what remained of it was made so smooth and sweet by what I told her that night.