had forgotten anything even, and so she just lay and looked up at the other’s dark slender head against the unshaded light.
“Poor child, you have had a hard day, haven’t you?” She put her hand on Jenny’s brow, smoothing back the fine hushed gold of Jenny’s hair, stroking her hand along Jenny’s cheek. Jenny lay quiet under the hand, drowsing her eyes like a stroked kitten, and then she knew she could cry all right, whenever she wanted to. Only it was almost as much fun just lying here and knowing you could cry whenever you got ready to, as the crying itself would be. She opened her blue ineffable eyes.
“Do you suppose he’s really drownded?” she asked. Mrs. Wiseman’s hand stroked Jenny’s cheek, pushing her hair upward and away from her brow.
“I don’t know, darling,” she answered soberly. “He’s a luckless man. And anything may happen to a luckless man. But don’t you think about that any more. Do you hear?” She leaned her face down to Jenny’s. “Do you hear?” she said again.
......
“No,” Fairchild said, “he ain’t the sort to get drowned. Some people just ain’t that sort. . . . I wonder,” he broke off suddenly and gazed at his companions. “Say, do you suppose he went off because he thought that girl was gone for good?”
“Drowned himself for love?” Mark Frost said. “Not in this day and time. People suicide because of money and disease: not for love.”
“I don’t know about that,” Fairchild objected. “They used to die because of love. And human nature don’t change. Its actions achieve different results under different conditions, but human nature don’t change.”
“Mark is right,” the Semitic man said. “People in the old books died of heartbreak also, which was probably merely some ailment that any modern surgeon or veterinarian could cure
