Judge Van Lew answered quite affably:
“Take Mrs. Maxwell, if you choose, my dear. It would be a very proper arrangement.”
And when Viola went to see about it she did not find her hard to persuade, she had such pleasant recollections of two previous journeys across the ocean in better days.
“One was my bridal trip, dear, and the other when Rolfe was fifteen years old. Ah, how my poor boy enjoyed that summer abroad!” she sighed, wiping away the quick, starting tears.
Viola wept, too, in sympathy, and said, tenderly:
“We will visit all the places he liked best, and you shall tell me all he said and did there. It will be like getting better acquainted with my husband, whom I knew such a little while.”
It was setting a pleasant task for the bereaved mother, this rehearsing the past sayings and doings of her beloved dead. Such stories as she could tell Viola of Rolfe’s bright ways, his manliness, his tenderness, his bravery, were enough to thrill any woman’s heart, and Viola grew to know him well, now he was gone, and the aching cry of her heart grew more intense with time:
“Could ye come back to me, Douglas, Douglas!”
In the golden May-time they journeyed across the ocean, leaving the little cottage boarded up and deserted, so that weeks later, when the postman opened the gate with a letter that would have brought gladness to the mourner’s heart, there was no one to receive it, and the neighbors said Mrs. Maxwell had gone away weeks before, and they did not know her address.
The postman sent the letter to the Dead Letter Office, marked “Can not be found,” and several bulky ones that followed it shared the same fate, until by autumn they ceased to come, the writer evidently giving up in despair. It could not have been Mae Sweetland, for she knew that her aunt was in Europe, and kept up an animated correspondence with her and Viola, so it was quite a mystery who could have been sending those letters to Mrs. Maxwell.