“She’s very like you,” he answered, “it--it--” he was going to say “shocked me,” but he had a feeling she would not understand him. “It surprised me,” he said instead. “Oh, she’s very like me. Every one sees it. Her father says she is just a _replica_ of what I was when he first knew me. And she’s such a sweet, loving little thing. You don’t know how they work here--and with me to take care of. God has blessed me in my children, Jim.” She turned her large, sunken eyes on him, their somberness lit by the fire of her maternal passion. “They are the best girls in the world,” she said. “Then you’ve been happy, Alice?” he suddenly asked. “Happy!” she echoed. “Oh, yes, always happy except when our boy died. That was our sorrow. I don’t know whether you ever heard of it. He was just a baby, but he was our only son. A beautiful boy. He was John Beauregard Allen, too.” The Colonel made no comment, but she did not notice it, engrossed in her own recital. “Of course we’ve not been very successful, especially of late years. But poverty’s not so bad when you’ve got those you love around you. And we’ve been like a little company, close together, always marching shoulder to shoulder--‘a close corporation,’ Beau calls it. We’ve had bad luck of all kinds, but you can bear bad luck when you’re all together.” The past, the bitter, terrible past was dead to her. She had probably never understood what it had been to him. Now twenty years of love and struggle had almost obliterated it from her memory, and the coming of death had wiped away its last faint traces. “You _have_ been blessed, Alice,” he said in a low voice. “Life has fulfilled all your expectations.” “Not all,” she answered. “What doesn’t matter for yourself matters for your children. It’s hard for me to see them living here, and this way--” she made a gesture which swept the garden and the vineyard. “That’s hard for a mother, a mother who was bred differently and bred them for something different. I educated them myself, Jim. They’re not like the country girls around us. They’re--” she paused a moment and then said with an air of sad solemnity--“the children of a lady and a gentleman.” “Any one can see that,” he murmured, “and they’re happy too.” He did not know what else to say. He could not condole with her. In her poverty and sickness she had fulfilled the purposes of her life, lived it with a passionate completeness as he had never done. The fullness of it, compared to the barren emptiness of his, augmented the sense of bleak loneliness that lay heavy at his heart. “They’re young,” she continued, “they’ve not known much better. Our bad times began when they were still little. But I--well, before I was sick it was different. I helped them and I was a companion, not a care. Virginia City, too, was a place where, as they grew older there would have been more amusement for them. They’d have had a better chance.”