“Yes, I remember.”
“It’s hard to talk about it, yet sometimes I feel as if I’d like to. You see, I was so little when we drifted off, she and I. I didn’t know how to help, how to save her anything. Yet it has always seemed to me since that I ought to have known—I ought to have known!” His hands clenched, his voice had subsided to a groan.
“You were her comfort when you least thought it,” said Lois.
“Perhaps; I’ve always hoped so, in my saner moments. No matter how I should try I could never tell anyone what that time was really like. It seems now as if we were wandering for years, but I don’t suppose it was for so very long. We stumbled along from day to day, and slept out at night, always trying to keep away from people, when—she thought we were going back to our old home in the South, and that they would prevent us.” He stopped for a moment, and then went on, driven by that Ancient Mariner spirit which makes people, once they have touched on a forbidden subject, probe it to its haunting depths. “Did Cater tell you how she died? She died in a barn. My mother! She used to hold me in her arms at night, and make me rest my head against her bosom when I was tired; and I didn’t even have a pillow for her when she was dying; it’s one of those things you can never make up for—that you can never change, no matter how you live, no matter what you do. It comes back to you when you least expect it.”
Both were silent for a while before Lois murmured: “But the pain ended in happiness and peace for her. It would hurt her more than anything to know that you grieved.”
“Yes, I believe that,” he acquiesced simply. “I’m glad you said it now. I couldn’t rest until I got money enough to take her out of her pauper grave and lay her by the side of her own people at home.”
“And you have had a pretty hard time.”
“Oh, that’s nothing!” He squared his shoulders with unconscious rebuttal of sympathy. “When I was a kid, perhaps—but I get a lot of pleasure out of life.”
“But you must be lonely without anyone belonging to you,” said Lois, trying to grope her way into the labyrinth. “Wouldn’t you be happier if you were married?”
He laughed involuntarily and shook his head, with a slight flush that seemed to come from the embarrassment of some secret thought. The action, and the change of expression, made him singularly charming. “Possibly; but the chance of that is small. Women—that is, unmarried women—don’t care for my society.”