The Heart of Rachael

A few months later James Gregory became a convert to her religion.

Charles, the second son, had never wavered from his mother's

faith, and rejoiced with her in this great event. But the first-

born, Warren, as all but his mother called him, to avoid confusion

with his father, was a junior in college when these changes took

place, and when he came home for the long vacation his mother knew

what her cross must be for the years to come. He listened to her

with the appalling silence of the nineteen-year-old male, he

kissed her, he returned gruff, embarrassed answers to her

searching questions of his soul, and he escaped from her with

visibly expanding lungs and averted eyes. She knew that she had

lost him.

Men called him a good man, and she assented with dry lips and

heavy eyelids. Charles died, leaving a young widow and an infant

son, the father shortly followed, and Warren came home from his

interne year, and was a good son to her in her dark hour. When

they began to say of him that he would be great, she smiled sadly.

"My father was a doctor," she said once to an old friend, "and

James inherits it!" But at a memory of her own father, erect and

rosy among his girls and boys in the family pew, she burst into

tears. "I would rather have him with his father, with George and

Charles, and with my angel Francis, than have him the greatest man

that ever lived!" she said.

But if she had not made him a good Catholic she had made him a

good man, and it was a fair and honorable record that Warren

Gregory could offer to the woman he loved. Love--it had come to

him at last. His thoughts went back to Rachael. It seemed to him

that he had always known how deeply, how recklessly he loved her.

He had a thrilling memory of her as Persis Pomeroy's guest, years

ago, an awkward, delightful seventeen-year-old, with her hair in

two thick braids, looped up at the neck, and tied with a flaring

black bow. He remembered watching her, hearing for the first time

the delicious voice with its English accent: "Well, I should say

it was indeed!"

"Well, I should say it was indeed!" Across more than ten years he

recalled the careless, crisp little answer to some comment from

Persis, his first precious memory of Rachael. The girls, he

remembered, were supposedly too young for a certain dance that was

imminent, they were opposing their youthful petulance--baffled

roses and sunshine--to Mrs. Pomeroy's big, placid negatives.

Gregory could still see the matron's comfortably shaking head, see

Persis attacking again and again like a frantic butterfly, and see

"the little English girl," perched on the porch rail, looking from

mother to daughter smilingly, with her blue, serious eyes.