“When I think of that summer two years ago,” the speaker went on, “and how Gilbert and the child and I used to romp on this very strip of sand, I marvel that I can be here, alone, and still live!”
The soft, elderly palm, which covered her own, quivered.
“Oh, Mother Graham, forgive me!” she said, turning quickly. “I am selfish in my sorrow—I know it. And I keep forgetting that he was once your little boy, even as the baby was mine.”
“He is my little boy still—and always will be,” Gilbert Graham’s mother answered steadily.
“Do not think, Judith,” she added, “that I condone the past, or make light of what you have suffered. I am sure you know, my dear, that my chief object in life, just now, is to help you.”
“I do know it. I could not have endured these past months if you had not let me come to you.”
They sat for some time in silence.
“Our little man was just two years old the summer that we spent here at Snug Harbor Beach,” Judith Graham said, presently. “I remember how Gilbert used to carry him out on his shoulder and how he would shriek with delight when the water swept in round his father’s knees. It seems to me now that those weeks were my very last gleam of sunshine. To think that in less than two months from that time my baby was dead!”
The older woman made no attempt to stem this outburst of grief. Youth must make its plaint, she thought pitifully; and the girl—she was little more—at her side was one of those who are capable of receiving death-wounds through the very completeness of their love.
“Of late,” she said, after a while, speaking in a low tone, “it has seemed to me that this cannot be the end, Judith, either for you or Gilbert. I have been thinking much of God’s all-loving, all-wise plan for each one of us, and how we seem to draw back from it, even to dread it; whereas, in reality, it can hold nothing but happiness for every creature. I wish—oh, I wish with all my heart that I had thought of these things earlier in life, while Gilbert was still a boy! But then I was so proud of his good looks, of his popularity, of his talent for drawing, that I unconsciously made the turning aside into easier paths his rule of living. It has been the old story—no restraining father’s hand, an over-fond mother and an impressionable boy.”