“It was so odd your just happening on June that way. She says you were so kind to her, she felt immediately you were her friend. Poor little June! It was such an amusement for her that evening. She’s not had much pleasure of that kind. And she’s twenty now, just the age when a girl longs for a little of the good times of life.”
“She’s very like you,” he answered, “it—it—” he was going to say “shocked me,” but he had a feeling she would not understand him. “It surprised me,” he said instead.
“Oh, she’s very like me. Every one sees it. Her father says she is just a replica of what I was when he first knew me. And she’s such a sweet, loving little thing. You don’t know how they work here—and with me to take care of. God has blessed me in my children, Jim.”
She turned her large, sunken eyes on him, their somberness lit by the fire of her maternal passion.
“They are the best girls in the world,” she said.
“Then you’ve been happy, Alice?” he suddenly asked.
“Happy!” she echoed. “Oh, yes, always happy except when our boy died. That was our sorrow. I don’t know whether you ever heard of it. He was just a baby, but he was our only son. A beautiful boy. He was John Beauregard Allen, too.”
The Colonel made no comment, but she did not notice it, engrossed in her own recital.
“Of course we’ve not been very successful, especially of late years. But poverty’s not so bad when you’ve got those you love around you. And we’ve been like a little company, close together, always marching shoulder to shoulder—‘a close corporation,’ Beau calls it. We’ve had bad luck of all kinds, but you can bear bad luck when you’re all together.”
The past, the bitter, terrible past was dead to her. She had probably never understood what it had been to him. Now twenty years of love and struggle had almost obliterated it from her memory, and the coming of death had wiped away its last faint traces.