I told
myself if the treatment failed it would be soon enough for David to know
of Silva when he came home. There was nothing he could do, and to share my
anxiety might hamper him in his work. He wrote glowingly of the new placer
he had discovered, and that was a relief to me, for I was obliged to ask
him to send me a good deal of money,--the specialist's account had been so
large. I believed he would start south when the Alaska season closed, for
he had written I might expect him then, with his pockets full of gold
dust, and I made my letters entertaining--or tried to--so he need not feel
any need to hurry. At last, one morning in the bath, when Silva was five
months old, he moved his right limb voluntarily. I shall never forget. It
renewed my courage and my faith. At the end of another month he moved the
left one, and after that, gradually, full use came to them both. It was
then, when the paralysis was mastered, I sent the letter that was lost. At
the same time David wrote that he must spend a second winter in Alaska.
But before that news reached me, my reaction set in. I was so ill I was
carried, unconscious, to the sanitarium. And, while I was there, Silva,
who had grown so sturdy and was creeping everywhere, followed his kitten
into the garden, and a little later old Jacinta found him in the arroyo.
There was only a little water running but--he had fallen--face down."

Tisdale rose. Meeting her look, the emotion that was the surface stir of
shaken depths swept his face. Then, as though to blot out the
recollection, she pressed her fingers to her eyes.

"And David was thousands of miles away," he said. "You braved that alone,
like the soldier you are."

"When I read David's letter," she went on, "he was winter-bound in the
interior. A reply could not have reached him until spring. And meantime
Elizabeth Morganstein came with her mother to the hotel. We had been,
friends at boarding-school, and she persuaded me to go north to Seattle
with them. Later, after the _Aquila_ was launched in the spring, I was
invited to join the family on a cruise up the inside passage and across
the top of the Pacific to Prince William Sound. It seemed so much easier
to tell David everything than to write, so--I only let him know I intended
to sail to Valdez with friends and would go on by mail steamer to Seward
to visit him. That had been his last post-office address, and I believed
he expected to be in that neighborhood when the seaso