Mrs. Moore was naturally surprised when the visitor was introduced; but she hailed his presence with obvious relief. MacGonigal and Jake were invited to join the tea-party--and, at any other time, the cowboy's struggles with a tiny cup and saucer of delicate china, a microscopic teaspoon, and a roll of thin bread and butter would have caused a good deal of merriment. Mac, thanks to his training in the store, juggled easily with these implements, and there was an air almost of light-heartedness about the company before it broke up at Power's suggestion that he and Dacre might smoke while surveying some part of the ranch.
Dacre showed his knowledge of human nature by leading his friend on to talk of his mother. That way, he was sure, lay the waters of healing. While deploring the unhappy circumstances which attended Mrs. Power's death, which Dr. Stearn put down to failure of the heart's action, he swept aside her son's bitter self-condemnation.
"Death," he said, "is the one element in human affairs which may not be estimated in that general way. If your mother's heart was affected, she was far more likely to die of some sudden excitement than because of a not very poignant anxiety as to your prolonged absence from home. I suppose, in a sense, she knew where you were?"
"Yes. I--I deceived her with sufficient skill," came the morbid retort.
"Then you must school yourself to dwell on those long years of pleasant companionship in the past rather than this final parting, which you attribute to a cause that exists only in your imagination. I think Tennyson's philosophy is at fault in the line:
'Sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.'
I hold that Cowper peered more closely into the fiber and essence of humanity when he wrote:
'The path of sorrow, and that path alone, Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown; No traveler ever reached that blest abode Who found not thorns and briars in his road.'
You were utterly unnerved and wretched when the news of your mother's illness reached you. You magnified your personal responsibility out of all reasonable proportion. I can see no proof of other influence than the fixed course and final outcome of a disease difficult to detect and incapable of cure."