“I left her very quiet, dear.”
“There!” said Kathleen stormily, “we could talk of nothing else this morning but darling, darling little Silvy, and of her. Of course they don’t all know Mrs. Rhodes, but every one had seen him, at any rate. It seems so dreadful for her to lose all she had in the world! She isn’t very young, is she?”
“About my age, dear.”
“Well, that’s not old, of course, but still—What I can’t make out, sister, is why she should be afflicted in this way. Mrs. Harper had known her, like you, ever since she was a little girl, and she has had so many troubles; all her people died soon after she was married, and her husband was not—nice, and he lost all her money before he died, and she has always been so good and lovely and patient and uncomplaining, so earnestly striving to do right, so that Mrs. Harper says she has been an example to everyone. Why should she have this terrible, terrible blow fall upon her? Why should her sweet, darling little child be taken away? What has she done that she should be punished so? It seems wrong—wrong! I don’t understand it.”
“I’m afraid I don’t, either,” said Helen very low. She put her hand on her heart for a minute and looked up, smiling a little wistfully. Her own trouble was so old that people had forgotten it.
“We nearly got crying,” pursued Kathleen, “all the girls, I mean. Harvey Spencer tried to make us laugh; he told jokes—horrid ones. Oh, how silly he was! I hate society men. But it seemed as if we couldn’t get off the subject; first one thing brought it up, and then another. Everybody wants to do something for Mrs. Rhodes. What I was going to tell you was that Mary Barbour said she believed that sweet little Silvy was taken because his mother made an idol of him; that you shouldn’t love anybody so much—that it was wrong. I don’t believe it, sister! I don’t believe it; you can’t love anyone too much! People forget what love means, and it seems unnatural to them when we love as much as we can. Oh, you may look at me! I think of a great, great many things I never tell. You and my brother Orrin, who have done everything and had everything, you think me silly and romantic, but I am wiser than you. It’s because you’ve forgotten. Why, there’s nothing but love that makes life worth living!” said young Kathleen, her voice thrilling through the room. “I shall never try to love only a little, no matter what happens, but as much, as much, as much, always, as God will let me, if I die for it myself!”
She went over to Helen and flung herself down on the floor beside her, and laid her head in Helen’s lap.
“He will let you,” said Helen with an unsteady voice. Something in her tone made the girl raise her head suddenly—their eyes met in a long look, and a deep rose overspread Kathleen’s face before she hid it again. To the elder woman had come quite unbidden a picture of a man carrying tenderly in his strong arms the white, still body of a little dead child. She would like to have told Kathleen if shyness had not held her tongue. After all, he did not seem quite unworthy. If Orrin thought—
He made a grimace when she told him in the brief half hour they had together before she left the house.
“It is only the conclusion I had been coming to,” he said. “There is nothing personally against the man; I almost wish there were. I knew Kathleen would be too much for us—Kathleen and love. But how she can want him, I cannot see.”