Sobbing—she had scarcely cried until now—she carried it to the writing-table, and put it just where it had always stood.
“I want it, Daddy,” she said, smiling down wet-eyed on the still face. “You don’t know how much you handled it. I seem always to have seen it in your hand. No one shall touch it again but me—just yours and mine, Daddy—our little jade doll, in a pink cradle. Stay there!” she told the joss, and then sobbing, but pressing back her tears, and wiping them away when they would come, that her sight might be clear for its last loving of that dear, dead face, she bent over the coffin, spending their last hour together, saying—good-by.
“Oh, Daddy—my Daddy——” The sobs came then, long and louder. Latham, watching in the hall, heard them, but he did not go to the girl; nor let any one else do so.
BOOK III
THE QUEST
CHAPTER XIX
The spring waxed into radiant molten summer, mocking with its lush of flower-life, its trill of bird-voice, its downpouring of sunshine, the agony of the nations, and the pitiful grief in one English girl’s inconsolable heart.
Other girls lost their lovers. Never a home in England but held some bereavement now, never a heart in Christendom but nursed some ache. But most of the sorrow and suffering was ennobled and blazoned. Other girls walked proud with their memories—his D.S.O. pinned in their black, the ribbon of his Military Cross worn on their heart, tiny wings of tinsel, of gold, or of diamonds rising and falling with their breath, a regimental badge pinning their lace, a sailor’s button warm at a soft white throat—telling of a “boy” sleeping cold, unafraid in the North Sea, or (proudest of all these) a new wedding-ring under a little black glove—and, perhaps——
Other girls packed weekly boxes for Ruhleben, or walked the London streets and the Sussex lanes with the man on whose arm they had used to lean leaning on theirs, blinded, a leg gone, or trembling still from shell-shock, a face mutilated, broken and scarred in body, nerve-wrecked, but hers, hers to have and to hold, to love and to mother, to lean on her love, to respond to her shy wooing, to beget her children; to show the world, and God, how English women love.