"Oh yes, of course." Tilly was silent for several minutes. Then she added: "The poor woman is afraid that John will not forgive her. She doesn't want help from him, she declares, and she thinks it would be unwise for them ever again to meet face to face, but she says she would like for him to know how sorry she is for many things. I think, myself, Joel, that it would be inadvisable for—for them to meet, just at present, anyway. Don't you?"
"I don't know. I can't say. I'm not in a position to decide," Joel floundered. "It would depend on him. It is unfortunate that so many miles separate them. He evidently has some established way of living into which she might not fit so well. The mere fact of his being still alive reached her by accident and through no effort on his part."
"I'm sure she has no idea of making any advancement." Tilly seemed to Joel, as she spoke, quite another woman from the one who had been his wife all those years, and Joel simply sat, bent forward, his every nerve and muscle drawn taut by vast swirling forces within him.
"Then you don't think that he would—would forgive her?" asked Tilly, with obvious anxiety which she was striving to minimize.
Joel's prompt reply surprised her. "I know he would," said Joel, "if he knew all the circumstances. I have never known a nobler man. I don't believe a nobler man ever lived. In trying to help his mother I was only doing what I was sure he would have done for me under the same conditions. If I only knew how to show him what his mother now is I'd do it."
They were silent for a while; then, suddenly, Tilly stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. "Joel," she said, "you are blue to-night." She toyed with the hair on his brow; she bent almost as low as when in that posture she sometimes kissed him, but she did not kiss him to-night, and he noted the fact as a man dying unattended in a dungeon might test his own pulse. He longed to take the little hand so close to his cheek and press it to his famished lips, but something told him that she would (not openly, but inwardly) now actually shrink from such a caress.
"No, don't think I am blue," he protested, fighting forward on his black billows, and grimly smiling. "You are happy and I shall be for your sake. You mustn't observe my cranky ways too closely. I'm all right."
"Somehow I can't exactly believe it." Tilly twisted a lock of his hair between her slow, reluctant fingers. "You seem changed, a little, anyway, and I think we ought to come to a thorough understanding right now. You have an imagination, Joel. You used to write poetry to me, you remember, and for all I know you may now be fancying all sorts of really absurd things. Now be sensible. John and I did love each other away back there, but we were parted and for years I have thought of him as dead. But now he is away off up there, and I am here with you and our darling children. You love them, they love you—and—and you love me, and I—love you. Now be sensible. Can you, even with a crazy flight of your imagination, fancy that John and I ever again will or could be—be like we once were? Throw the idea away if you have it. Of course, I must be happy in discovering that my hasty desertion back there did not cost him his life and Dora's. Oh, that thought worried me! I never let you know how much it worried me! I guess I would have married you much sooner than I did if I had not had that on my mind. But all that is past and gone now. I'm here and John is away off up there. Your idea that he still loves me is ridiculous on the face of it. What was I, even when he was here? Only an ignorant country girl, while he has no doubt grown and learned and altered in a thousand ways. I've seen successful men from big cities. They don't seem to think as we do, or act or speak like us. I'd be a silly dowdy to such a man. I think, of course, if it comes about naturally, that his mother ought to go to him, but I don't think he ever ought to—to come back here, and I am sure that he won't. I am sure of that—I'm sure of it. He has been burnt once, as the saying is, and that will be enough. But I predict that she will go to him. No, I'll take that back. I said that, but I am not sure. Do you know, it is God's truth, Joel, that the sweet old soul loves you and me and the children so much now that she would not leave us even—even for John. She let that out this afternoon while Tilly was sleeping in her lap. The very thought of going started her to crying, and it was some time before I got her quiet."
Tilly's hand actually touched his neck, but Joel still felt that he had no right to clasp it. The wild thought of grasping it and drawing his wife's lips down to his possessed him, but he promptly killed the impulse. Grimly he told himself that he would be fondling a shadow, feasting on a husk.
Suddenly she drew her hand away. "I'm awfully tired to-night," she sighed. "I'll go to bed, but you needn't hurry. Shall I fill your pipe?"