She glanced at him wistfully and then out over the trees.
“Nursing isn’t the road to perpetual youth,” she said. Then lest he should catch up her words, she continued swiftly: “But you must tell me where you have been, how you’ve come back to life. You disappeared utterly. You never wrote. If we all thought you dead, was it our fault? When Godfrey showed me your letter, I never dreamed who James Burden might be.”
“Godfrey?” Baltazar pounced on the name. “Do you call him Godfrey? Then you must be old friends. Hence the miracle of finding you together. Have you been mothering him all his life?”
She shook her head. “How you jump at conclusions! No. I met him for the first time when I came here—a month ago.”
“So it’s just Chance, Fate, Destiny, the three of us meeting like this? The hand of God? . . . Wait, though. I can’t see quite clearly. You learned he was my son?”
She smiled again:
“Do you think we call all young officers here by their Christian names?”
“Does he know that you knew me?”
“If he didn’t,” she replied, “he wouldn’t have consulted me about Mr. Burden’s letter. I wish I had been mothering him all his life,” she added after a pause; “but I’ve been doing my best for the last month. I can’t help loving him.”
“What does he know about you and me?”