“Mrs. Temple, have you forgotten George Throckmorton?” he asked in his pleasant voice.
Mrs. Temple turned to him with a somber look on her gentle face.
“No, I have not forgotten you, George Throckmorton. But you and I are widely apart. Between us is a great gulf, and war and sorrow.”
A deep flush dyed Throckmorton’s dark face. He was not prepared for this, but he could not all at once give up this friendship, the memory of which had lasted through all the years since his boyhood.
“The war is over,” he said; “we can’t be forever at war.”
“It is enough for you to say,” she replied. “You have your son. Where is mine?”
“As well call me to account for the death of Abel. Dear Mrs. Temple, haven’t you any recollection of the time when you were almost the only friend I had? I have few enough left, God knows.”
Here General Temple came to the front. In his heart he was anxious to be friends with Throckmorton, and did not despair of obtaining Mrs. Temple’s permission eventually. He held out his hand solemnly to Throckmorton.
“I can shake hands with you, George Throckmorton,” he said, and then, turning to Mrs. Temple, “for the sake of what is past, my love, let us be friends with George Throckmorton.”
Throckmorton, who in his life had met with few rebuffs, was cruelly wounded. In all those years he had cherished an ideal of womanly and motherly tenderness in Mrs. Temple, and she was the one person in his native county on whose friendship he counted. He looked down, indignant and abashed, and in the next moment looked up boldly and encountered Judith’s soft, expressive eyes fixed on him so sympathetically that he involuntarily held out his hand, saying: