She laughed and for an instant her old fierce defiance was there then, as though some spirit had flashed, before his eyes, through the window into space and freedom it was gone. She herself proclaimed its dismissal.
"It's gone—it's all gone—Dr. Chris. I'm the happiest woman in England!"
But even as she spoke her eyes were wistful; half-seen, half-recalled, eloquent with a colour, a flame that was too fierce for her present world, hung before her the memory of a moment when, in a darkened room, she had caught a letter to her lips, had sunk upon her knees before a passion whose face she had scarcely seen but whose voice she had heard and still now, in her new life, remembered. She had had her moment ... the last strains of its dying music were still in her ears. She caught her breath, then, turning, dismissed it; and, standing back from Christopher, gave him her last word—
"But look after Francis. Be with him as much as you can.... He needs all that you can spare—He's got to be—he's simply got to be—the success of the family!"
CHAPTER XIII
EPILOGUE—PROLOGUE
"Third Apparition—A Child Crowned ..."
Macbeth.