“It is a bit strange that now another wonderful but bitter experience should come into my life on this spot where we are standing,” he told her. He spoke quietly, trying to calm her; striving to crowd back his own emotions. “I guess fate picked this spot as the right place for us to say farewell to each other. I stood here one day and saw old Etienne draw a dead woman to the surface of the water, and I found a letter in her breast and I took her key and went and found little Rosemarie.”
She stared at him, her eyes very wide in the darkness.
“And that dead woman—she was the mother of the little girl?”
“Yes, a poor weaver that the mills had broken. And Rosemarie and I sat all night under this tree. It is too long a story for you now. No matter about that, but I—”
“I know about Rosemarie,” she confessed.
“And my heart opened and something new came into it, little sister of the rose. And now on this spot I stand, and all joy and hope and love are dead for me when I give back to you these dear little hands.”
She was still staring at him.
“But I must not—I dare not speak of it,” he proceeded. His grasp grew tense. “See how I am trying to be calm? I will not loose my grip on myself. Our doom was written for us by other hands, dear heart. When it was summer I walked here with Rosemarie and play-mamma. Now it is autumn and—”
“Play-mamma!” she gasped.
“Yes, a dear, good girl who worked hard in the mill and who was very good to our Rosemarie; I was making poor shifts at buying a little girl's clothes, and Zelie Dionne was wise in those matters and was busy with her needle.”