"What is it, darling?" she asked. "Oh, it's the bright rose!" Then she hurriedly unfastened the flower from her waist-belt and turned to Lavendar. "Will you please take your penknife and scrape away all the little thorns," she asked.
"The rose looked very charming where it was," he remarked, half regretfully, as he did what she commanded.
"It will look better still, presently," she answered.
The child's hands were outstretched longingly to grasp the flower, its eyes, unnaturally deep and wise with pain, were fixed upon Robinette's face. She bent over the chair, and her voice was like a dove's voice, Lavendar thought, as she spoke. Then the little melancholy carriage was wheeled away. Motherhood always seemed the most sacred, the supreme experience to Robinette; a thing high and beautiful like the topmost blooms of Nurse Prettyman's plum tree. "If one had to choose between that sturdy boy and this wistful wraith, it would be hard," she thought. "All my pride would run out to the boy, but I could die for love and pity if this suffering baby were mine!"
Lavendar had turned, and leaned on the wall with averted face. "Sweet woman!" he was saying to himself. "It is more than a merry heart that is able to give such sympathy; it's a sad old world after all where such things can be; but a woman like that can bring good out of evil."
Robinette had seated herself on a low wall beside him. Her little embroidered futility of a handkerchief was in her hand once more. "A rose and a smile! that's all we could give it," she said; "and we would either of us share some of that burden if we only could." She watched the merry, healthy children playing beside them, and added, "After all let us comfort ourselves that brown cheeks and fat legs are in the majority. Rightness somehow or other must be at the root of things, or we shouldn't be a living world at all."
"Amen," said Lavendar, "but the sight of suffering innocents like that, sometimes makes me wish I were dead."
"Dead!" she echoed. "Why, it makes me wish for a hundred lives, a hundred hearts and hands to feel with and help with."
"Ah, some women are made that way. My stepmother, the only mother I've known, was like that," Lavendar went on, dropping suddenly again into personal talk, as they had done before. He and she, it seemed, could not keep barriers between them very long; every hour they spent together brought them more strangely into knowledge of each other's past.