“Will, his brother, had been wild from his very boyhood—from his fifteenth year. He drank heavily, gambled; he and his father had been enemies for a long time. Uncle Tom had advanced money to Will, great sums of it, and Will had gambled it away. He left Will a comfortable fortune, he left Roger Wastewater and the rest of his money. And Roger was—everything. He had a manner, a sweetness—I don’t know, a way of seeming interested—seeming absorbed in what you were telling him.
“And he was witty, too. What parties I can remember here, when they would all be laughing at him—crying with laughter——
“I was twenty when Uncle Tom died. My mother went on keeping house for Roger and Will, and perhaps she thought sometimes of what I prayed and prayed might come to pass—that Roger Fleming and I might be man and wife, and Wastewater her home for ever!
“For years I had to see him depart for those long visits of his in Boston, when he was—ah, yes, it wasn’t only my imagination!—when he was the idol of them all—fêted and followed and imitated by the very best of them. I had to say good-bye to him when he started off to Europe with beautiful girls in the party—money, youth, lovely clothes, romantic settings—all against me!
“Presently he was thirty, and I was twenty-five—twenty-six—twenty-seven—— And then, suddenly, he seemed for the first time to see me. I didn’t dare believe it at first.
“I didn’t dare believe it. He would follow me down to the shore and sit there with Lily and me—he would come back unexpectedly from Boston or New York—I would hear his voice, as I hear it now: ‘Flo! Where’s Flo?’
“Ah, what days those were! They seemed all rose-colour. I’ve come to hate the memory of them now—but they were Heaven then! Sometimes now I find myself obliged to go over them, day after day, and hour after hour—day after day and hour after hour of a fool’s Paradise——
“One day he said to me—one night rather, when there was gray moonlight over the garden, and he and I were walking up and down, and poor Lily, inside at the piano, was singing—‘Flo, why is it that I have grown to prefer puttering about this old place with you and Lil to any other thing in the world?’
“‘Perhaps because you like me, Roger,’ I said. I’ve been ready to bite my tongue out for it a thousand times in these thirty years! But it bought me a few more hours of insanity then. He caught me in his arms and laughed as he kissed me.
“‘Why, that’s the way of it, is it?’ he said. ‘How long has this been going on, eh?’