“She’s gone,” he said.  He looked at his mother once, as if measuring her value to him.  Then he turned away.  There was no comfort for him there.

Often, since, Kate had wondered concerning the child.  She had imagined his grim home, his barren days; the plain food; the compulsory task; the kind, yet heavy-handed, coarse-voiced mother.  She was convinced that the grandmother had been different.  In the corner where she had sat, there must have been warmth and welcome for the child.  Perhaps there were mellow old tales, sweet old songs, soft strokings of the head, smuggled sweets—­all the beautiful grandmotherly delights.

XIII

Since Kate had begun to write, a hundred—­a thousand—­half-forgotten experiences had come back to her.  As they returned to her memory, they acquired significance.  They related themselves with other incidents or with opinions.  They illustrated life, and however negligible in themselves, they attained a value because of their relation to the whole.

It was seldom that she felt lonely now.  Her newly acquired power of self-expression seemed to extend and supplement her personality.  August von Shierbrand had said that he wished to marry her because she completed him.  It had occurred to her at the time—­though she suppressed her inclination to say so—­that she was born for other purposes than completing him, or indeed anybody.  She wished to think of herself as an individual, not as an addendum.  But, after all, she had sympathized with the man.  She was beginning to understand that that “solitude of the soul,” which one of her acquaintances, a sculptor, had put into passionate marble, was caused from that sense of incompletion.  It was not alone that others failed one—­it was self-failure, secret shame, all the inevitable reticences, which contributed most to that.

She fell into the way of examining the men and women about her and of asking:—­

“Is he satisfied?  Is she companioned?  Has this one realized himself?  Is that one really living?”

She remembered one person—­one only—­who had given her the impression of abounding physical, mental, and spiritual life.  True, she had seen him but a moment—­one swift, absurd, curiously haunting moment.  That was Karl Wander, Honora’s cousin, and the cousin of Mary Morrison.  They were the children of three sisters, and from what Kate knew of their descendants’ natures, she felt these sisters must have been palpitating creatures.

Yes, Karl Wander had seemed complete—­a happy man, seething with plans, a wise man who took life as it came; a man of local qualities yet of cosmopolitan spirit—­one who would not have fretted at his environment or counted it of much consequence, whatever it might have been.

If she could have known him—­

But Honora seldom spoke of him.  Only sometimes she read a brief note from him, and added:—­