They stood by the sea-wall together with the fresh wind playing on their faces. “Isn’t it curious,” said Robinette, “how instinctively one always turns to look at the sea; inland may be ever so lovely, but if the sea is there we generally look in that direction.”
“Because it is unbounded, like the future,” said Lavendar. He was looking as he spoke at some children playing on the sands just beside them. There was a gallant little boy among them with a bare curly head, who refused help from older sisters and was toiling away at his sand castle, his whole soul in his work; throwing up spadefuls––tremendous ones for four years old––upon its ramparts, as if certain they could resist the advancing tide.
“What a noble little fellow!” exclaimed Robinette, catching the direction of Lavendar’s glance. “Isn’t he splendid? toiling like that; stumping about on those fat brown legs!”
“How beautiful to have a child like that, of 142 one’s own!” thought Lavendar as he looked. On the sands around them, there were numbers of such children playing there in the sun. It seemed a happy world to him at the moment.
Suddenly he saw his companion turn quickly aside; a nurse in uniform came towards them pushing, not a happy crooning baby this time, but a little emaciated wisp of a child lying back wearily in a wheel chair. Something in Robinette’s face, or perhaps the bit of fluttering lace she wore upon her white dress, had attracted its notice, and it stretched out two tiny skeleton hands towards her as it passed. With a quick gesture, brushing tears away that in a moment had rushed to her eyes, young Mrs. Loring stepped forward, and put her fingers into the wasted hands that were held out to her. She hung above the child for a moment, a radiant figure, her face shining with sympathy and a sort of heavenly kindness; her eyes the sweeter for their tears.
“What is it, darling?” she asked. “Oh, it’s the bright rose!” Then she hurriedly unfastened the flower from her waist-belt and turned to Lavendar. “Will you please take your penknife and scrape away all the little thorns,” she asked.
“The rose looked very charming where it was,” he remarked, half regretfully, as he did what she commanded.
“It will look better still, presently,” she answered.
The child’s hands were outstretched longingly to grasp the flower, its eyes, unnaturally deep and wise with pain, were fixed upon Robinette’s face. She bent over the chair, and her voice was like a dove’s voice, Lavendar thought, as she spoke. Then the little melancholy carriage was wheeled away. Motherhood always seemed the most sacred, the supreme experience to Robinette; a thing high and beautiful like the topmost blooms of Nurse Prettyman’s plum tree. “If one had to choose between that sturdy boy and this 144 wistful wraith, it would be hard,” she thought. “All my pride would run out to the boy, but I could die for love and pity if this suffering baby were mine!”