There was always something of the child
in her, and her laugh was its voice, as eloquent of the past to me
as was the christening robe to her. But I had not made her forget
the bit of her that was dead; in those nine-and-twenty years he was
not removed one day farther from her. Many a time she fell asleep
speaking to him, and even while she slept her lips moved and she
smiled as if he had come back to her, and when she woke he might
vanish so suddenly that she started up bewildered and looked about
her, and then said slowly, 'My David's dead!' or perhaps he
remained long enough to whisper why he must leave her now, and then
she lay silent with filmy eyes. When I became a man and he was
still a boy of thirteen, I wrote a little paper called 'Dead this
Twenty Years,' which was about a similar tragedy in another woman's
life, and it is the only thing I have written that she never spoke
about, not even to that daughter she loved the best. No one ever
spoke of it to her, or asked her if she had read it: one does not
ask a mother if she knows that there is a little coffin in the
house. She read many times the book in which it is printed, but
when she came to that chapter she would put her hands to her heart
or even over her ears.
CHAPTER II - WHAT SHE HAD BEEN
What she had been, what I should be, these were the two great
subjects between us in my boyhood, and while we discussed the one
we were deciding the other, though neither of us knew it.
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