“‘Always,’ I told him. ‘Poor little Flo,’ he said, ‘with all you know of me, is it like that?’
“‘Like that,’ I said, and he kissed me again. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we will have to see about this!’
“That was all. Presently I ran into the house with my heart simply singing, and all that summer night I lay awake laughing and crying for joy. And the next morning I hardly dared raise my eyes to him.
“It was that next day that your mother came to Wastewater, David. It was the very next day——”
Flora had been talking with her eyes shut. Now she opened them, almost as if she were surprised to see the circle of attentive and serious young faces. Her hand beat the coverlid restlessly.
“Your mother was about thirty, and a widow,” she said. “She had been widowed a few months before your birth, and you were only three or four weeks old. She was a beautiful woman, with reddish thick hair, all swathed in crêpe, and with the trailing dresses of the tiny baby in her arms. Her father was an Argentine planter, and she was taking you—David—back to Rosario, where she had sisters and cousins. But for some reason the boat was a month delayed—a strike, perhaps, the service was very uneven then—and she had written my mother asking if she might come for a few days to Wastewater. Families did more of that sort of thing then. Her husband had been a Fleming, and I remember that he had once spent a vacation with us here, when he was a little boy—David Fleming. She told me a hundred times afterward that she had written my mother only because she was so lonely and sad in the big city—she hardly expected an answer. She knew that Tom Fleming was dead, she hardly knew anything about Roger and Will.
“So she came here, not six months a widow, and from the instant she got here Roger Fleming was a changed being. I never saw a man so instantly—possessed. That very first night he was asking me: ‘Isn’t she beautiful, Flo? Isn’t she wonderful?’ He hung about her—I don’t think he ever thought of me again, or of anything but Janet. Seven weeks later they were married.
“She was beautiful,” Flora went on, after a dead silence in which none of the young persons seemed to find the right word, and in which her hand beat steadily on the bed, and her eyes were shut. “She went with him to Boston, Washington, everywhere! And ten months later she gave him a son—Tom.”
She looked at Tom strangely, closed her eyes again.
“My mother, all this while,” Flora resumed, “had been like a sort of housekeeper. She was a little, wiry woman, very gray, as poor Lily was, at the end. Two years after Roger and Janet were married my mother died, and then Lily and I felt keenly what our exact position here was—poor relations in a rich man’s house.