She came, with her slow stately step, and Laurence put out his hand and drew her to his side.
"What is it?" she asked, with a faint tremulousness in her voice.
The old man, standing a step apart, and looking at the other three, replied.
"We were thinking of the likeness.... Yes, it's more on your side—yet I don't know—"
"Mary and I are different enough, eh?" said Laurence with a slight laugh. "That might account for almost anything. She's pure English, you see—English Puritan.... It was two enemy races mating when we married, eh, Father?"
"That makes the American, maybe," said the old man, still curiously intent on the boy.
But John, embarrassed by this prolonged attention, now broke away and left them.
"He's not like either of us," said Laurence abruptly, watching the boy's retreating figure. "That is, only a little. He's like a flower, sprung from heaven knows where."
Glancing again at the mirror he saw the quick response in Mary's face. In the mirror their eyes met with a deep flash of sympathy. Yes, this was something they both felt deeply and in common—the strange beauty of this child who had, nevertheless, sprung from them, from their two lives, however marred and futile.... Their union had at least produced this thing of beauty....
They looked at one another with a deep sad gaze. Laurence, with a sharpened vision, saw something in Mary's face new to him. The physical change must have come slowly—Mary had not been ill for a long time, that sharpening of the contours that gave her beauty its new delicacy was perhaps only age. But what he saw was not physical. He saw suddenly that she was grieving, suffering, he did not know why; it gave him a quick throb of pain. He would have put his arm around her, but that she moved away sharply. At the same moment he felt again the clouding of his sight, the dizziness.... But, abruptly alleging that he must get to work, he was able to leave the room with only a slight unsteadiness of gait, which, he knew, might easily be attributed to another cause.