He put the letters slowly back in his pocket.
"Yes. It's like a chronic pain. It hurts, but it weaves itself into the pattern of one's life. My mother's like that. My father was out here too, and they were often separated. She accepts it as inevitable."
"But you—your loneliness must be worse, out there in the wilderness."
"It's not a wilderness, it's peopled with all kinds of things—all kinds of"—— He caught himself up. "And I have friends in all the villages, and my animals and my work."
"I know your work is wonderful—the noblest work in the world." She spoke with a grave, youthful wisdom. "But the loneliness must remain all the same, Major Tristram."
He was silent for a moment, and then shook himself as though freeing himself from a burden.
"It can't be helped," he said. "No one can share it with me."
"Many people would be proud and glad to share it," she answered. She held her head high, and there was a fervent simplicity in her low voice which raised the impulsive words above suspicion. He turned to her with warm eyes.
"Thank you," he said. "I don't think it's true, and I shan't ever put it to the test—but it's good hearing."
He turned the pony neatly into the gates of the Boucicaults' bungalow and drove up the shady avenue to the porch. A syce ran out to meet them and caught the reins, and a minute later Anne Boucicault had been lifted gently to the ground. "And we've chattered so much," Tristram remarked shamefacedly, "that I don't even know your mother's symptoms."