They were silent a long while. The bees crooned about, now and then a bird lilted in the gladness of his heart. Virginia Deering was asking herself if she had ever loved like this, and what she had suffered patiently for her love. For her self-will and self-love there had been many a pang. But she let her soul go down now to the divinest humiliation. Whatever _he_ did henceforth, even to the dealing out of sorest punishment, must be right evermore in her eyes.
The children were coming back from their ride, joyous, noisy, exuberant; their eyes sparkling, their cheeks beginning to color a little with the vivifying air and pleasurable excitement. Dil glanced at them with a soft little smile.
“I think they want you,” she said. “They like you so. An’ I like you too, but I’ve had you all this time.”
“You are a generous little girl.” Virginia was struck by the simple self-abnegation. “I will come back again presently.”
She did not let the noisy group miss anything in her demeanor. And yet she was thinking of that summer day, and the poor roses she had taken so unwillingly. How she had shrunk from them all through the journey! How she had tossed them out, poor things, to be fought over by street arabs. They had come back to her with healing on their wings. And that John Travis should have seen them, and the two little waifs of unkind fortune. Ah, how could _she_ have been so fatally blind and cruel that day among the roses? And all for such a very little thing.
What could she say to this simple, trustful child? If her faith and her beliefs had gone outside of orthodox lines, for lack of the training all people are supposed to get in this Christian land, was there any way in which she could amend it? No, she could not even disturb it. John Travis should gather in the harvest he had planted; for, like Dil, she believed him in sincere earnest. She “almost knew that he meant to set out on the journey to heaven,” if not in the literal way poor, trusting little Dil took it. And she honored him as she never had before.
“Don’t you want to hear about the picture?” she asked. “It quite went out of my mind. Mr. Travis exhibited it in London, and a friend bought it and brought it home. I saw it a fortnight ago. So you brought him a great deal of good fortune and money.”