He looked into her eyes, holding her hand, and she felt his body trembling. She knew he was about to speak, and held up a warning hand.
“That’s all, my lad,” she said with a smile. “My love to you, and God speed you.”
Mrs. Phillips progressed slowly but steadily. Life was returning to her, but it was not the same. Out of those days there had come to her a gentle dignity, a strengthening and refining. The face, now pale and drawn, had lost its foolishness. Under the thin, white hair, and in spite of its deep lines, it had grown younger. A great patience, a child-like thoughtfulness had come into the quiet eyes.
She was sitting by the window, her hands folded. Joan had been reading to her, and the chapter finished, she had closed the book and her thoughts had been wandering. Mrs. Phillips’s voice recalled them.
“Do you remember that day, my dear,” she said, “when we went furnishing together. And I would have all the wrong things. And you let me.”
“Yes,” answered Joan with a laugh. “They were pretty awful, some of them.”
“I was just wondering,” she went on. “It was a pity, wasn’t it? I was silly and began to cry.”
“I expect that was it,” Joan confessed. “It interferes with our reason at times.”
“It was only a little thing, of course, that,” she answered. “But I’ve been thinking it must be that that’s at the bottom of it all; and that is why God lets there be weak things—children and little animals and men and women in pain, that we feel sorry for, so that people like you and Robert and so many others are willing to give up all your lives to helping them. And that is what He wants.”
“Perhaps God cannot help there being weak things,” answered Joan. “Perhaps He, too, is sorry for them.”