“I could not write all this about our baby,” she went on, “and I told myself if the treatment failed it would be soon enough for David to know of Silva when he came home.  There was nothing he could do, and to share my anxiety might hamper him in his work.  He wrote glowingly of the new placer he had discovered, and that was a relief to me, for I was obliged to ask him to send me a good deal of money,—­the specialist’s account had been so large.  I believed he would start south when the Alaska season closed, for he had written I might expect him then, with his pockets full of gold dust, and I made my letters entertaining—­or tried to—­so he need not feel any need to hurry.  At last, one morning in the bath, when Silva was five months old, he moved his right limb voluntarily.  I shall never forget.  It renewed my courage and my faith.  At the end of another month he moved the left one, and after that, gradually, full use came to them both.  It was then, when the paralysis was mastered, I sent the letter that was lost.  At the same time David wrote that he must spend a second winter in Alaska.  But before that news reached me, my reaction set in.  I was so ill I was carried, unconscious, to the sanitarium.  And, while I was there, Silva, who had grown so sturdy and was creeping everywhere, followed his kitten into the garden, and a little later old Jacinta found him in the arroyo.  There was only a little water running but—­he had fallen—­face down.”

Tisdale rose.  Meeting her look, the emotion that was the surface stir of shaken depths swept his face.  Then, as though to blot out the recollection, she pressed her fingers to her eyes.

“And David was thousands of miles away,” he said.  “You braved that alone, like the soldier you are.”

“When I read David’s letter,” she went on, “he was winter-bound in the interior.  A reply could not have reached him until spring.  And meantime Elizabeth Morganstein came with her mother to the hotel.  We had been, friends at boarding-school, and she persuaded me to go north to Seattle with them.  Later, after the Aquila was launched in the spring, I was invited to join the family on a cruise up the inside passage and across the top of the Pacific to Prince William Sound.  It seemed so much easier to tell David everything than to write, so—­I only let him know I intended to sail to Valdez with friends and would go on by mail steamer to Seward to visit him.  That had been his last post-office address, and I believed he expected to be in that neighborhood when the season opened.  But our stay was lengthened at Juneau, where we were entertained by acquaintances of Mrs. Feversham’s, and we spent a long time around Taku glacier and the Muir.  I missed my steamer connections, and there was not another boat due within a week.  But the weather was delightful, and Mr. Morganstein suggested taking me on in the yacht.  Then Mrs. Feversham proposed a side trip along Columbia glacier and into College fiord.  It was all very wonderful to me, and inspiring; the salt air had been a restorative from the start.  And I saw no reason to hurry the party.  David would understand.  So, the second mail steamer passed us, and finally, when we reached Seward, David had gone back to the interior.  The rest—­you know.”