"Ah, dear!" Tears welled in Mrs. Cameron's eyes. "How glad I'll be."
Deirdre went with her into the well-known parlour, and they sat down and talked together awhile. There was a new and tender understanding between them. Mrs. Cameron talked of her loneliness and the joy Davey's home-coming would be to her.
"Oh, I have prayed so, Deirdre," she said, "It has nearly broken my heart being without him ... what with the long nights here, and the sorrow that has come upon us...."
That was all she said of the other trouble, yet it had almost broken her, and had taken all her fortitude and patient wifeliness to endure. An instinct of blind fidelity was part of Mary Cameron.
When Deirdre was going she kissed her. There was lingering affection in the pressure of her lips.
"My heart goes out to you, dear," she said. "It's almost as if you were my own child. I love you like that, Deirdre. It was good of you to come to-day. Now I will get Davey's room ready for him ... and the little room you used to sleep in. You'll be coming to stay with us again when he comes home, won't you? Oh, I could laugh and cry with happiness to think the old times will come again."
Deirdre laughed, a little laugh of shy joyousness. She could not tell Mrs. Cameron that she would be coming to stay with her altogether soon.
"Davey will be able to get on better with his father now," Mrs. Cameron continued, giving expression to her dreams. "He will be able to get Donald to do what he wants, without angering him. His father has lost many of the ways he had, and you wouldn't believe how he loves the boy, in spite of everything. It's a strange, dour way a man has of loving sometimes, dear—hard to bear. It's love all the same—not love the way women love—that tries to make life easy for the dear one. It's all tenderness and sacrifice a woman's love, Deirdre...."
"Sometimes a man loves that way too," Deirdre said.
She had swung into her saddle and was looking away before her, over the mist-wreathed hills. For a moment her eyes lay on Mrs. Cameron's face with its grey-green eyes, delicate contour, exquisite line of lips, loving and lovable. Her face had lost its youthful freshness, but its beauty was unimpaired, so tender its expression, so compelling and pure the light of her eyes, though a lonely soul looked out of them, pained and wondering.