Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/206

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you talk as if you had a cold in the head. What don't you understand?"

"It's so strange there'll be people there—in that garden—year after year—just as we were. They'll come there and never know anything happened there. . . . There'll be people there, looking down over that cliff at the sea a hundred years from now. It's so strange——"

"Yes, of course there'll be people there," Mrs. Ambler said. "Probably a thousand years from now; they were there a thousand years ago, and three thousand for that matter. It's an everlasting sort of place. Do you think it does any good to cry about it?"

But she knew what her daughter was crying about, and her sharpness was tactful. She said no more, but took up a book and read, apparently paying no attention to anything else. Claire was silent, sitting motionless, and, as the afternoon waned, her mother, glancing at her almost imperceptibly, saw that her eyes were dry. She was pale, but her breathing was quiet and not troubled by the little starts and catches that had beset her during the first hour of their journey.

The train stopped at the seaport town of Castro-