“So many things are going to happen that you will not see!” cried Kate.  “Why, maybe in a little while we shall all be going up in flying-machines!  You wouldn’t like to miss that, would you?  Or your son will be growing into a fine man and you’ll not see him—­nor the woman he marries—­nor his children.”  She stopped, breathing hard.

“It is like the sound of the surf on a distant shore,” smiled Mrs. Leger.  “Good-bye, Miss Barrington.  Don’t grieve about me.  I shall be happier than you can know or dream.”

The conductor swung Kate off the train after it was in motion.

* * * * *

So, among other things, she had that to think of.  She could explain it all merely upon the hypothesis that the sound of the awakening trumpets—­the trumpets which were arousing woman from her long torpor—­had not reached the place where this wistful woman dwelt, with her tender remorses, her delicate aversions, her hunger for the indefinite consolations of religion.

Moreover, she was beginning to understand that not all women were maternal.  She had, indeed, come across many incidents in her work which emphasized this.  Good mothers were quite as rare as good fathers; and it was her growing belief that more than half of the parents in the world were undeserving of the children born to them.  Also, she realized that a child might be born of the body and not of the spirit, and a mother might minister well to a child’s corporeal part without once ministering to its soul.  It was possible that there never had been any bond save a physical one between Mrs. Leger and her son.  Perhaps they looked at each other with strange, uncomprehending eyes.  That, she could imagine, would be a tantalization from which a sensitive woman might well wish to escape.  It was within the realm of possibility that he was happier with his grandmother than with his mother.  There might be temperamental as well as physical “throwbacks.”

Kate remembered a scene she once had witnessed at a railway station.  Two meagre, hard-faced, work-worn women were superintending the removal of a pine-covered coffin from one train to another, and as the grim box was wheeled the length of a long platform, a little boy, wild-eyed, gold-haired, and set apart from all the throng by a tragic misery, ran after the truck calling in anguish:—­

“Grandmother!  Grandmother!  Don’t leave me!  I’m so lonesome, grandmother!  I’m so afraid!”

“Stop your noise,” commanded the woman who must have been his mother.  “Don’t you know she can’t hear you?”

“Oh, maybe she can!  Maybe she can,” sobbed the boy.  “Oh, grandmother, don’t you hear me calling?  There’s nobody left for me now.”

The woman caught him sharply by the arm.

“I’m left, Jimmy.  What makes you say such a thing as that?  Stay with mother, that’s a good boy.”

They were lifting the box into the baggage-car.  The boy saw it.  He straightened himself in the manner of one who tries to endure a mortal wound.