"How important!" cried Fran, throwing back her head. "What will God dowhen she dies?"
"Perhaps I have gone too far. Still, it would be impossible to replace her."
Fran made a step toward him—"My mother was replaced."
He started up. "You shall not speak of that. She lived her life, and I demand the right to live mine. I tell you, the past is ended."
"But I am here," returned Fran. "I have not ended. Can't you look into my face and see my mother living? She paid for her secret marriage, wandering over the face of the earth with her baby, trying to find you. I don't deny that you've paid for all—yes, even for your desertion and your living a hidden life in this town. Maybe you've suffered enough. But that isn't the question. Look at me. I am here. I have come as truly out of your past as out of the past of my darling, uncomplaining—what did you call her?—'friend'. And being here, I ask, 'What will you do with me?' All I want is—just a little love."
The long loneliness of her life found expression in the eager voice, in the yearning eyes. As he stared at her, half-stupefied, he imagined she was holding out her arms to him in pleading. But it was not this erect form, slight and tense, that reached forth as if to clasp him to her heart; it was a memory of his youth, a memory that in some oddmanner blurred his perception of the living presence. From the fragile body of Fran, something leaped toward him, enveloping, overpowering.
It was partly Fran, and partly somebody else—how well he knew that other somebody, that dead woman who had found reincarnation in the soul of this wanderer.
She thought his covered face a token of weakening. "You must have loved my mother once. Is it all so dead and forgotten that there is none left for your child?"
But she was seeking to play upon strings that had long since ceased to vibrate. He could not bring back, even in retrospect, the emotions inspired by Josephine Derry. Those strings had been tuned to other love-harmonies. To remember Fran's mother was to bring back not the rapture of a first passion, but the garrish days of disillusionment. He even felt something like resentment because she had remained faithful—her search and unending love for him made so much more of his desertion than ever he had made.
He could not tell Fran that he had never loved her mother. The dead must not be reproached; the living could not be denied—so he was silent.