Free I Married A Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich Page B

coifed in the blue blanket, looking solemnly out the window. Made her fingers flutter in that special wave you give to very small babies.
                    The look on her face couldn't have been described. It was as when life begins all over again, after an interruption, a hiatus. It was as when the sun peers through again at the end, at the end of a bleak wintry day.
                    The girl holding the baby put her head down close to his, almost as if averting it from the window. Or as if they were communing together, exchanging some confidence in secret, to the exclusion of everyone else.
                    She was.
                    "For you," she breathed. "For you. And God forgive me." Then she carried him over to the door with her, and turned the latch to let the harassed porter in.
     
     
    14
     
                    Sometimes there is a dividing-line running across life. Sharp, almost actual, like the black stroke of a paintbrush or the white gash of a chalk-mark. Sometimes, but not often.
                    For her there was. It lay somewhere along those few yards of carpassage, between the compartment-window and the car-steps, where for a moment or two she was out of sight of those standing waiting outside. One girl left the window. Another girl came down the steps. A world ended, and another world began.
                    She wasn't the girl who had been holding her baby by the compartment-window just now.
                    Patrice Hazzard came down those car-steps.
                    Frightened, tremulous, very white in the face, but Patrice Hazzard.
                    She was aware of things, but only indirectly; she only had eyes for those other eyes looking into hers from a distance of a few inches away. All else was background. Behind her back the train glided on. Bearing with it its hundreds of living passengers. And, all unknown, in an empty compartment, a ghost . . . Two ghosts, a large one and a very small one.
                    Forever homeless now, never to be retrieved.
                    The hazel eyes came in even closer to hers. They were kind; they smiled around the edges; they were gentle, tender. They hurt a little. They were trustful .
                    She was in her fifties, their owner. Her hair was softly graying, and only underneath had the process been delayed. She was as tall as Patrice, and as slim; and she shouldn't have been, for it wasn't, the slimness of fashionable effort or artifice, and something about her clothes revealed it to be recent, only the past few months.
                    But even these details about her were background, and the man of her own age standing just past her shoulder was background too. It was only her face that was immediate, and the eyes in her face, so close now. Saying so much without a sound.
                    She placed her hands lightly upon Patrice's cheeks, one on each, framing her face between them in a sort of accolade, a sacramental benison.
                    Then she kissed her on the lips, in silence, and there was a lifetime in the kiss, the girl could sense it. The lifetime of a man. The many years it takes to raise a man, from childhood, through boyhood, into a grown son. There was bitter loss in the kiss, the loss of all that at a single blow. The end for a time of all hope, and weeks of cruel grief. But then too there was the reparation of loss, the finding of a daughter, the starting over with another, a smaller son. No, with the same son; the same blood, the same flesh. Only going back and starting again from the beginning, in sweeter sadder sponsorship this time, forewarned by loss. And there was the burgeoning of hope anew.
                    There were all those things in it. They were spoken in it, they