“And only to-morrow?”
“Yes. Charles would be tired out after a day at the mine, and so I——It would be good to have him to myself for one evening on our return to this house I love. It has seen all my life.”
“Ah, yes!” snarled the doctor, suddenly. “Women count time from the marriage feast. Didn’t you live a little before?”
“Yes; but what is there to remember? There were no cares.”
Mrs. Gould sighed. And as two friends, after a long separation, will revert to the most agitated period of their lives, they began to talk of the Sulaco Revolution. It seemed strange to Mrs. Gould that people who had taken part in it seemed to forget its memory and its lesson.
“And yet,” struck in the doctor, “we who played our part in it had our reward. Don Pepe, though superannuated, still can sit a horse. Barrios is drinking himself to death in jovial company away somewhere on his fundacion beyond the Bolson de Tonoro. And the heroic Father Roman—I imagine the old padre blowing up systematically the San Tome mine, uttering a pious exclamation at every bang, and taking handfuls of snuff between the explosions—the heroic Padre Roman says that he is not afraid of the harm Holroyd’s missionaries can do to his flock, as long as he is alive.”
Mrs. Gould shuddered a little at the allusion to the destruction that had come so near to the San Tome mine.
“Ah, but you, dear friend?”
“I did the work I was fit for.”
“You faced the most cruel dangers of all. Something more than death.”