certain to happen, yet the knowledge had not prepared her in any way. It seemed as hard to bear as if he had been killed suddenly by some terrible accident in the Mills.
He had not told her he was returning to Megambo until he had gone, when it was too late for her to act; and now she knew that he had died without ever seeing the letter she had sent, as it were, into space, to follow him in time to turn him back. He had died, she saw, without even knowing at all she had written, begging him not to be so hard, to think of her as his mother who was willing to sacrifice everything for his happiness. She would (she had written) forgive Mary, and try her best to behave toward her as if Mary were her own daughter. What more could she have done? To forgive Mary who had stolen him from her?
As she sat there the dull pain of a hopeless loneliness took possession of her. Here she was, at fifty, beginning for the first time to feel tired and in need of companionship, and she had no one—not even her own grandchildren. It was cruel, she told herself, to have suffered as she had suffered, with no reward but this—to end life alone after struggling for so long, always bent upon doing the right thing. Surely she had lived as God meant her to live, a Christian life filled with sacrifice to individuals and duty. Surely no one since Job had been so bitterly tried . . . no husband . . . no son . . . alone.
And presently her blunt, strong fingers tore open the envelope, and she read the letter. It was brief, almost like a cablegram . . . a few lines which told her what she already knew, that Philip, her little boy,
