wonder if nothing could be done with it. But it was, as surgeons say, an inoperable case. So I just gloomed at it and wished I had not let this doctor interpose his plumpness between Chris and Margaret, who since that afternoon seemed to me as not only a woman whom it was good to love, but, as a patron saint must appear to a Catholic, as an intercessory being whose kindliness could be daunted only by some special and incredibly malicious decision of the Supreme Force. I was standing with eyes closed and my hands abstractedly stroking the hat that was the emblem of her martyrdom, and I was thinking of her in a way that was a prayer to her, when I heard her sharp cry. That she, whose essence was a patient silence, should cry out sharply, startled me strangely. I turned quickly.

She was standing up, and in her hand she held the photograph of Oliver that I keep on my dressing-table. It is his last photograph, the one taken just a week before he died.

"Who is this?" she asked.

"The only child Chris ever had. He died five years ago."

"Five years ago?"

Why did it matter so?

"Yes," I said.

"He died five years ago, my Dick." Her eyes grew great. "How old was he?"

"Just two."

"My Dick was two." We both were breathing hard. "Why did he die?"

"We never knew. He was the loveliest boy, but delicate from his birth. At the end he just faded away, with the merest cold."

"So did my Dick—a chill. We thought he would be up and about the next day, and he just—"

Her awful gesture of regret was suddenly paralyzed. She seemed to be fighting her way to a discovery.

"It's—it's as if," she stammered, "they each had half a life."

I felt the usual instinct to treat her as though she were ill, because it was evident that she was sustained by a mystic 

 Prev. P 56/68 next