either. I wanted to _see_ him--to see if he still, if he
wants me now. He could _write_ anything. He'd feel he'd have to. How
would I ever know but that it was only because he thought he ought to?
I thought I would just go to him all by myself, without his knowing
I was coming. _I_ can tell--the first moment he looks at me I can
tell--for all my life, I'll be sure, one way or the other. That first
look, what's in him will show! He can't hide anything then, not even
to be kind. I'll know! I'll know!"

Arnold sat down again with no comment. Evidently he understood. He
leaned his head back against the rough bark of the pine, and closed
his eyes. There was a painful look of excessive fatigue about his
whole person. He glanced up and caught Sylvia's compassionate gaze on
him. "I haven't been sleeping very well lately," he said very dryly.
"It breaks a fellow up to lose sleep." Sylvia nodded. Evidently he was
not minded to speak of his own troubles. He had not mentioned Judith.

She looked up thoughtfully at the well-remembered high line of the
mountain against the sky. Her mother's girlhood eyes had looked at
that high line. She fell into a brooding meditation, and presently,
obeying one of her sure instincts, she sat down by Arnold, and began
to talk to him about what she divined for the moment would most touch
and move him; she began to talk about her mother. He was silent, his
worn, sallow face impassive, but she knew he was listening.

She told one incident after another of her mother's life, incidents
which, she told him, she had not noted at the time, incidents which
were now windows in her own life, letting in the sunlight her mother
loved so well. "All the time I was growing up, I was blind, I didn't
see anything. I don't feel remorseful, I suppose that is the way
children have to be. But I didn't see her. There were so many minor
differences between us ... tastes, interests. I always said hatefully
to myself that Mother didn't understand me. And it was true too. As
if it matters! What if she didn't! She never talked morality to us,
anyhow. She never talked much at all. She didn't need to. She was
herself. No words would express that. She lived her life. And there
it is now, there it always will be for me, food for me to live on. I
thought she had died. But she has never been so living for me. She's
part of me now, for always. And just because I see the meaning of her
life, why, there's the meaning of mine as clear