Miss Martin sat in
her chair by the window; her plain, thin face had not sought to turn
from the searching light. Desire felt her heart begin to beat with
the beginnings of an understanding as new as it was revealing.
"Don't be sorry," Miss Martin's reassurance was instant. "I am glad
to know. . . . I always did know, anyway . . . and it did not make
any difference . . . If you can understand."
Desire nodded. "He must have been very wonderful," she said. In that
new and nameless understanding she forgot that only that morning she
had referred to the dead musician as a "derelict" and "no good for
anything."
"Yes," said the invalid musing. "Not quite like the rest of us. And
I see now that he never would have been. I used to think--but the
difference was too deep. It was fundamental. . . . I feel . . . as
if he knew it . . . and just wandered on."
"But you?" Desire ventured this almost timidly. The quietness seemed
to intensify in the room. Then the invalid's voice, serene, distant.
"I? . . . There is no hurry. . . . He has his fiddle, you see. . . ."
Miss Martin smiled and the smile held no bitterness. So might a
mother have smiled over a thoughtless child who turns away from a
love he is too young to value.
Desire was silent.
"I did not know love was like that," she said after a long pause.
"But perhaps I do not know anything about love at all."
The older woman looked at her with quiet scrutiny.
"You will," she said.
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