“Oh! did she!” said Uncle Robert with contempt. “I don’t think there is the slightest chance of such a thing. Philip is very satisfied with his condition. His work is more to him than any woman, even his mother!”
“You are unkind now,” she said with as much displeasure in her voice as her gentle nature was capable of showing.
“No,” he contradicted. “I am not unkind. I am as fond of the lad as a man can be, but I am not blind to his faults.”
“But you do not realize his suffering,” she protested.
“I realize that he has got over it,” affirmed Uncle Robert. “It has become a sort of poetic regret—an interesting adjunct in his personality.”
But Mrs. Barrimore shook her head, her eyes shining with love for that boy of hers, and with conviction that she understood him, which his Uncle Robert failed to do.
The person who really did understand Philip was Eweretta Alvin, for though she was mistaken in believing that he had consoled himself with Phyllis Lane, she had studied his face to some purpose. She realized that the dead can be forgotten, and that a love sworn to be eternal can end with a few shovelfuls of earth upon a coffin. She realized, too, that love could end so, even though two people were united in marriage. Love could pass away in life as well as in death.
It was this conviction that helped her more than anything else to rise above the blow she had received.
“Philip would have ceased to care in any case,” she told herself. “It is well that he thinks me dead.”
She had been warned both by Mrs. Le Breton and by her uncle that she would probably encounter Philip, now that she was free to come and go.