“She looked like a little girl, Catherine,” he said at last, only sorrowfully. “You would not have known her. And so beautiful! Oh, wicked!” Again his face contracted.
And, indeed, though he did not see it at the moment, as poignant an emotion for him as any in all the tragedy lay in the destruction of so much sheer beauty. Afterward, weeks afterward, he perceived this, and recognized with pain that Marian herself had understood it, even tenderly at the last.
The bell of the telephone on Stacey’s desk rang, and he reached slowly for the receiver. Catherine gazed at him apprehensively, but he spoke quietly enough, just a few words, in reply to the message, then hung up the receiver and turned to Catherine.
“She is dead,” he murmured. “She died in her sleep. She never waked after I left her.”
There was nothing to say. The two sat there in silence for some minutes.
“You must go down, Catherine,” Stacey said finally. “It is almost seven. Thank you.”
She rose reluctantly. “You’ll let me have something sent up to you?”
“No! No! I can’t eat!” he exclaimed with revulsion. “I have to think,” he added, “of what to say to Mrs. Latimer. I must go to see her after a while. What can I say?”
Catherine gave him a look in which there was something like pride. But all that she answered was that he must eat something; then went out.
He sat there, reflecting painfully. He felt tired, hopeless, alive in a dead empty world, but he was less tense now.