“I don’t know. She was a married woman, with two or three children, when he met her; and as loyal a one as ever breathed, he said, the only time he spoke of her; but whether she cared for him—”
“Ah! she did—she did, I’m sure,” Bridget answered swiftly, bending over the picture. “You poor little grandmother!” she added softly. She rose, and silently replaced the sketch, laying it gently, almost reverently, he noticed, in the drawer.
When she came back to her seat she was silent a moment, fingering the tassels of the work-bag in her lap absently, with a trace of nervousness. This discovery seemed to have brought them in some peculiar fashion suddenly near to one another. Bridget felt all at once unaccountably shy.
“It is so strange,” she said quietly at last, breaking a somewhat awkward silence, “that it was all so long ago. Yet how young she looks! I remember I spoke of her the first time I ever saw you—” She stopped.
“At the Wagner concert,” Carey said, finishing the sentence. “I remember, when you told me your name was Bridget, I said to myself, quite involuntarily, Bridget O’Hea, and the thought of the sketch flashed through my mind. That was a delightful evening. Can’t we go to another Wagner concert together, Mrs. Travers, for auld lang syne?”
He waited, with a touch of eagerness in his look, for her answer.
“We will make up a party. Helen wants to go to the next one; and Jim will tolerate Wagner, for the sake of Helen, for one evening,” she said, unconcernedly.
“Let us consider it an arrangement, then, if the others agree,” Carey replied, in the same tone.
Bridget did not speak at once. She put her head back against her chair, a trifle wearily; her color had faded; she looked pale and tired.
Carey rose and fetched a cushion from the sofa.