"Yes," confessed Mrs. Caldwell again, "I'm glad!" And she leaned earnestly toward him: "Oh, Peter, isn't she wonderful?"
But Peter regarded her severely. "Ah, the deceit of woman! And I believed you when you claimed to be distressed! I sympathized with you!"
But Mrs. Caldwell was not to be abashed: "I've been a shocking hypocrite, haven't I? But you're so clever, Peter, that I expected you to see through me."
"I trusted you!" he mourned.
"Oh, Peter! Peter! That's the way a man always seeks to excuse his stupidity when a woman gets the best of him! But you can trust my sincerity now. And you can sympathize with me if Sheila's not a poet. You seem to doubt her being one!"
"She isn't a poet—yet. She may become one. I can't tell about that. What I am sure of is that she has a remarkable mind—as I told you long ago. She has things to express, and evidently the time has come when she wants to express them. That's the hopeful point."
"Then she is promising—for all your laughter?"
"Indeed she is! These poems are funny—but every now and then there's a flash of light through them. Mrs. Caldwell, I believe in the light. I don't know what Sheila will do with it, but it's there—and it's wonderful!"
The tears were in Mrs. Caldwell's eyes again, not the bright tears of anger, but the soft mist that rises from a heart profoundly moved. As Peter spoke, the drops overflowed and rolled slowly down her cheeks, but she was unconscious of them. "You don't know what this means to me!" she said.
"I didn't know you would feel like this about it. You deceived me so thoroughly! But now I wonder why I didn't realize, in spite of all your protestations, that you'd care just this deeply. I should have understood what things of the mind are to you—you were my grandfather's friend!"