The Bishop glanced up, “And I suppose he’s also the other grandmother’s.”
“No! Florence has no mother. I’m all the grandmother that baby’s got!”
“I think you never told me that before,” he paused thoughtfully, then looking over to her standing by the window, he said, feeling slowly for words, “So the baby’s mother, that girl out at Fair-Orchard, has had no mother—to go with her—on that way—a woman goes, to bring home, a little child?”
The Bishop’s voice was soft with the awe of many years ago. The grandmother flushed, muttering, “She would not have wanted me. She had Dan.”
The Bishop’s eyelids had fallen, quivering, over his eyes. He was far away; again he watched with Annie, with Nan, as he said, “But men cannot understand. God does not mean them to. Such things are a secret between God and women, like the coming of Mary’s little child. Each mother needs a mother then. It was not—it was not till then that I understood how much my Nan had lost when she lost her mother.”
“It did not live, did it, at all, your daughter’s child?” whispered Mrs. Graham.
The Bishop shook his head, not speaking, thinking of the little waxen loveliness they had laid to sleep with Nan in the hollow of her arm. His lips showed their rare palsied trembling, murmuring, “Both together, Nan and the little one. She had been so well! I was not prepared—” the eyelids of his quiet gray face trembled, then opened on the blue eyes, as he said, “Of course, we know they do not die. They are alive, somewhere where the dreams come true that we dream for our children.” He smiled into her eyes, “For we are great old dreamers, aren’t we, we grandparents?” He raised his hand from the chair-arm, as if it would have pleaded, “But I think each mother needs the grandmother to help her dream. I think she is wanting you now, that Florence out there.”
She faced sharp about, “Florence! Want me!” She looked at him in grim pity at his simplicity. “No, Bishop, Florence don’t want me! No more than I want her! We’re misfits, Florence and me,—worse luck for Dan, and for me, and for the baby, too, now!”
The blue eyes a-twinkle, “And worse luck for Florence, too,” he persisted. “She sent you the picture. Wasn’t it perhaps to say that she wants to show you the baby himself?”
“It’s like you to think that, Bishop, but it’s not like Florence to mean that. I understand Florence! I can still see her face plain, that last morning!”