He was beginning to forget her. When the woman whom one loves is
to marry one's brother, and that brother happens to be of all the family
the one whom one prefers, what quality can be so admirable as
inconstancy?
Still, for a man who was really forgetting, he argued the matter too
much in his mind. Even when he got far south, among the Florida keys,
and saw the legions of the heron and the ibis stalking with stately gait
along the wet sand, and every now and then thrusting in their "javelin
bills," spiking and bringing out long wriggling flashes of silver that
went alive down their throats, he would still be thinking it over. Yes;
he was forgetting her. He began to be in better spirits. He was in very
good spirits one day in January when, quite unknown to him, the snow was
shovelled away from the corner of a quiet churchyard in which his mother
slept, and room was made beside her for the old man who had loved him as
his own.
Old Daniel Mortimer had no such _following_ as had attended the funeral
of his mother, and no such peaceful sunshine sleeping on a landscape all
blossom and growth.
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