"I—I took him with me, against her remonstrances, I feel obliged in common justice to say, to a house where I had business. He begged to go and I could see no reason why he should not. But as it turned out it was most unfortunate. I have reason to think that there was a child in the house recovering from scarlet fever, and in just the condition, Semple tells me, to communicate it."
"And there was no card?" she asked in wonder.
He hesitated. "They tell me there was a card. But I will have to acknowledge that I did not see it."
"You took Philip—in spite of Mammy Cely's remonstrances—into a house infected with a deadly disease," she said slowly, "and failed to see the most obvious of warnings."
"Say all you want to say," he answered miserably. "You cannot blame me more than I have blamed myself."
Six months before she would have taken him at his word, but a sudden sense of the futility of words smote her. Perhaps, too, even in that trying moment the wretchedness of his face touched her.
"Recriminations are worse than useless," she said at last. "I have found that out. There have been enough of them between us. In God's name, let us work together for once and try to save him."
"You are more than generous," he said after a long pause.
How much more quickly does thought travel than foot of beast. Margaret's was leaping forward with lightning rapidity. She was at Philip's side; saw him gasping, dying in her arms; stood beside his casket looking down upon the face that she would see no more; saw a solitary woman's figure sitting by a little grave saying "This is the end." Then it seemed as if she heard an unknown voice saying, "This was a quarrel that God alone could settle, and he has done it in his own way."
She drew a quick breath then, almost like a child's gasping sob. Oh, anything but that! Anything! Let him but live! The wheels moved, turned on monotonously, she watching them.... Nothing could be so bitter and so hopeless as death. Nothing! A Bible story that she had heard Mrs. Pennybacker read one day in Rosalie's room came suddenly without reason into her mind. It was about the two women who claimed the one child, each saying, "This is my son that liveth, and thy son is the dead." It had seemed to her a cruel test that Solomon the Wise had put them to when he said, "Bring me a sword," and then, "Divide the living child in two and give half to the one and half to the other." And while the false claimant said, "Yea, let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it;" surely it was the true mother, the one whose the living child was that cried out with yearning, "Oh, my lord, give her the living child and in no wise slay it."... Oh, it was a true test! Anything but death! anything but death!