“You have been blessed, Alice,” he said in a low voice. “Life has fulfilled all your expectations.”
“Not all,” she answered. “What doesn’t matter for yourself matters for your children. It’s hard for me to see them living here, and this way—” she made a gesture which swept the garden and the vineyard. “That’s hard for a mother, a mother who was bred differently and bred them for something different. I educated them myself, Jim. They’re not like the country girls around us. They’re—” she paused a moment and then said with an air of sad solemnity—“the children of a lady and a gentleman.”
“Any one can see that,” he murmured, “and they’re happy too.”
He did not know what else to say. He could not condole with her. In her poverty and sickness she had fulfilled the purposes of her life, lived it with a passionate completeness as he had never done. The fullness of it, compared to the barren emptiness of his, augmented the sense of bleak loneliness that lay heavy at his heart.
“They’re young,” she continued, “they’ve not known much better. Our bad times began when they were still little. But I—well, before I was sick it was different. I helped them and I was a companion, not a care. Virginia City, too, was a place where, as they grew older there would have been more amusement for them. They’d have had a better chance.”
She paused, her lids drooping, an air of musing melancholy on her face. Then she raised her eyes and looked at him.
“Who is there for them to marry here?” she asked.
“Marry!”—the Colonel had not thought of that. “They’re very young for that yet, aren’t they?” he stammered.
“Young? Yes, perhaps. But June is twenty now.”
She let her head drop back on the cushions behind it, and turned it slightly away from him so that he could see her in profile. Her hair was dressed in the fashion of her youth, parted and drawn down sleekly over the tips of her ears. Seen thus, the emaciation of her cheeks partly concealed, her face caught him with its sudden look of familiarity. For a moment the veil of years was jerked back and he saw his old sweetheart. He gave a murmured exclamation and leaned nearer to her, a word of tenderness trembling on his lips. Simultaneously she turned toward him, absorbed in her own thoughts.