“Whereto?”
She looked at him helplessly. “I don’t know.... And she’s always been so fixed before! Wherever I went, I seemed always just kind of circling around mother and coming back to her. And now she’s off like that—whirling into space!” She made a sweeping gesture of her hands and looked up to him appealingly.
The little laugh left William Archer’s face. “There’s no one in the world, of course, like mother.... Never has been—for me.... I suppose all men feel that way—about their mothers.” He said it slowly and looked at her inquiringly. “But it seems somehow as if she were somebody in particular—and nobody else could know—how we feel about her.”
“They can’t—and they don’t!” said Annabel grimly.
They stood looking at each other with quiet understanding. They had not felt so near together in years, not since they played in the branches of the oak-tree, and William Archer had called down to her from the topmost branch: “Come on up!”
She nodded to him with a little smile of remembrance and affection, and they turned and went their separate ways.
XX
From the window of the train Eleanor More looked out on green fields. They had emerged from the dark mouth of the tunnel into a spring day. The evening light was on the fields, and they stretched away to distant woods. The shadows along the ground caught a glow from the sky.