“All alone?”
“No, with May.”
Involuntarily, as she said it, she laid her work in her lap, as if her mind would follow undisturbed the happy figures of her children. She looked abstractedly at the window, as if she saw them both, the manly candor of her Gabriel, and the calm sweetness of May Newt—the loyal heart of her blue-eyed Ellen clinging to Edward Wynne. Down the windings of her reverie they went, roses in their cheeks and faith in their hearts. Down and down, farther and farther, closer and closer, while the springing step grew staid, and the rose bloom slowly faded. Farther and farther down her dream, and gray glistened in the brown hair and the black and gold, but the roses bloomed around them in younger cheeks, and the brown hair and the black and gold were as glossy and abundant upon those younger heads, and still their arms were twined and their eyes were linked, as if their hearts had grown together, each pair into one. Farther and farther—still with clustering younger faces—still with ever softer light in the air falling upon the older forms, grown reverend, until—until—had they faded in that light, or was she only blinded by her tears?
For there were tears in her eyes—eyes that glistened with happiness—and there was a hand in hers, and as she looked at her husband she knew that their hands had clasped each other because they saw the same sweet vision.
He looked at his wife, and said,
“Could I have been the rich man I one day hoped to be—the great merchant I longed to be, when I asked you to marry me—I could have owned nothing—no diamond—so dear to me as that very tear in your eye. I wanted to be rich—I felt as if I had cheated you, in being so poor and unsuccessful—you, who were bred so differently. For your sake I wanted to be rich.” He spoke with a stronger, fuller voice. “Yes, and when Laura Magot broke my engagement with her because of my first failure, I resolved that she should see me one of the merchant princes she idolized, and that my wife should be envied by her as being the wife of a richer man than Boniface Newt. Darling, you know how I struggled for it—you did not know the secret spur—and how I failed. And I know who it was that made my failure my success, and who taught a man who wanted to be rich how to be happy.”
While he spoke his wife’s arm had stolen tenderly around him. As he finished, she said, gently,
“I am not such a saint, Gerald.”
“If you are not, I don’t believe in saints,” replied her husband.
“No, I will prove it to you.”