They were alone now. He bent over her and said: "Christine--Christine,"
reassuringly, so that she should not be afraid, and gathered her in his
arms. How little she was--no heavier than a child--and cold. Her grey
head rested against his shoulder. If she had only stirred and laughed,
and said: "Your father was strong too!" he would have answered gently.
He would have been glad that the memory of his father could make her
happy. But it was all too late.
He carried her into her room. It was like her to have left it so neat
and ordered--each thing in its place--her out-door shoes standing
decorously together under the window, and her best skirt peeping out from
behind the cretonne curtain. Her hair-brush, with the comb planted in
its bristles, lay exactly in the middle of the pine-wood dressing-table.
When she had put it there, she had not known that it was for the last
time.
Or had she known? She had called out to him so insistently. She had
wanted to say good-bye. And he had gone on, not answering.
They said that people, at the end, saw their whole life pass before them.
Perhaps she had seen hers. Perhaps she had trodden the old road that he
was travelling over now. Only her vision of it would be different. It
was James Stonehouse and Robert's mother that she would see--radiant
figures of wonderful, unlucky people--and little Robert, who belonged to
both of them, tagging in the rear.
But he saw her--Christine lying white and still under the great mahogany
side-board, Christine coming back day after day in gallant patience to
scrub the floors and his ears, and pay the bills and chase away the duns,
and do whatever was necessary to keep the staggering Stonehouse menage on
its feet.
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