“Oh, Mr. Preston, thank you!” said Milly in wonder.
“It is a pleasure to me that you attend our services. If—” he paused, “if my daughter had lived she would have been your age—like you, in her springtime.”
He gazed past her solemnly and then taking off his hat to her, went on his way, leaving Milly overpowered with bewilderment.
What did it all mean? Who was right, and who was wrong? How did people drift apart after they were married? A new idea of the complexity of life came to her, the strange way in which human beings acted on each other, drawn, as by magnets, with the differing forces. Marriage to her had always presented a picture of growth in happiness, growth in goodness, a path upward together for lover and beloved. She tried now and for the first time vainly to recall if any in her limited circle of acquaintance seemed to fulfill these conditions. Sordidness, narrowness, selfishness, a jealous love of one’s children, these stood revealed instead to the casual eye.
She wrote a long page in her journal letter that night. His answer came back at last. It said: “Don’t bother your head, dear, about these things. You will always be the dearest girl in the world to me, and the purest and the best; and as for me, I never forget that I’m working for you, and if that won’t keep me straight, nothing will. What do you care about those old fossils of Prestons, anyhow? You are you, and I am I, and that’s all I care for, sweetheart.”
The wealth of meaning with which Milly freighted these honest lines it would take pages to chronicle; perhaps it was partly on account of some words of Mrs. Preston’s which haunted her: “I loved something that went by his name—it wasn’t William.”
The clergyman’s family remained in her mind an unsolved problem; it was nearly a month before she went to the rectory again, where she found Mrs. Preston “up to her ears,” as she expressed it, endeavoring to settle the affairs of a poor family who were preparing for emigration to the West. Her snapping black eyes and vivacious mien showed thorough enjoyment of the task, to say nothing of her dominant volubility. Mr. Preston, who came in from the garden bearing the first strawberry solemnly on a gilt plate for his wife’s acceptance, was unheeded until Milly directed attention to him. He had been waiting, he explained gravely, some days for this particular strawberry to ripen. Mrs. Preston said, “Oh, yes,” and thereupon ate the fruit absent-mindedly as she went on talking, with apparently no more appreciation of flavor than if it had been gutta percha, and quite ignoring the giver.
Milly could not help smiling, but she left the house more bewildered than ever. Mrs. Preston must like her life more than she thought she did, and it was impossible not to feel a little tinge of sympathy for Mr. Preston. Did people after all know what they really liked—or, indeed, what they really were? The moods of different days, of different hours, what kind of a whole did they form?
Her own life seemed to be all question in these days, to which nobody gave the answer.
Thus the second year stole on, and Norton’s home-coming appeared to grow no nearer. The photograph which he sent her startled by its unlikeness to her thought of him; those were the eyes that were to look into hers again some day, those the lips that were to kiss hers. After a while by much poring over it, the picture looked to her any way she pleased.