But instead of doing this, Antonia burst again into frenzied sobbing and hugged her comforter.
"O madame, you are the only person I dare love in the world!"
Marie smoothed the young widow's damp hair with the quieting stroke which calms children.
"Let mother help thee," she said; and neither of them remembered that she was scarcely as old as Antonia. In love and motherhood, in military peril, and contact with riper civilizations, to say nothing of inherited experience, the lady of St. John had lived far beyond Antonia Bronck.
"Your husband made you take an oath not to wed again,—is it so?"
"No, madame, he never did."
"Yet you told me he left you his money?"
"Yes. He was very good to me. For I had neither father nor mother."
"And he bound you by no promise?
"None at all, madame."