Medway was watching her curiously. "You have a most expressive face," he said. "I do not remember you well as a child. How old were you the last time we met?"
"Five or six, I think. The clearest thing I can remember, father, is one day when you were lying under the cedars and I had been gathering dandelions and came to look at a book you had. You played with me, and I accidentally burned my finger on your cigar. Then you were very kind and lovely; you took me to grandmother to have it tied up, and then you carried me on your shoulder through the orchard, and told me 'Jack and the Beanstalk.'"
"By Jove!" said Medway. "Why, I remember that, too!... First the smell of the cedar and then the apple blossoms.... You were a queer little elf—and you entered into the morals of 'Jack and the Beanstalk' most seriously.... Good lack! Whoever forgets anything! That to come back as soft and vivid!... Well, I thought I had forgotten you clean, Gipsy, but it seems I hadn't."
"You mustn't talk too much. Shall I sing you to sleep?"
"Yes, sing!"
Just before he dozed off, he spoke again, drowsily. "Have you heard them say how many days it will be before I am on my feet again?"
"No."
"I will want to show you and the Colonel—" But she had begun to croon "Swanee River," and he went to sleep with his sentence unfinished.
The next day he spoke of his drowned wife. It came as a casual remark, but with propriety. "Anna was a good woman. There could hardly have been a more amiable one. She had experience and tact; she was utterly unexacting. She had her interests and I had mine; we lived and let live.... I cannot yet understand how she happened to have been the one—"