She lifted her head and looked at him, searchingly, as one looks at the last link in a chain, in a chain of circumstantial evidence that began far away with medicine and little white shawls; with black sashes and a whispering nurse, and the visit to Gran’papa Valentine. She fingered those links, one by one, recognizing, testing them, and so arrived at last at the big, worried boy sitting by her in the hay.
“Mother is dead,” she said to him, in a voice that was entirely unemotional. She was confirming his statement, not questioning it.
“Oh, you know—perhaps—I daresay I muddled names—made a mistake,” he suggested, because he could not help it. And knew well enough that he had made none.
“Buried?”
“Oh, well—surely you must understand——” He was distressed. He did not know how to phrase his answers.
“There was poor Ben——” Her voice quivered. He could not know that she was re-living a memory, stumbling once more, as she played in the long grass behind the chicken-run, upon her little old dog who had been missing for two long days. She remembered her delight, and then her sudden terror, and the gardener, coming with his big spade. Mother had been within call. Mother had allayed that grief. Yet Laura had never quite forgotten the poor stiffened body and the tiny swarming ants.
And now Mother....
She was taken with a fit of shuddering. The dry-eyed sobs that a child should not know shook her pitilessly.
Justin, wishing desperately that he had his own infallible mother at hand to whom to surrender a situation that was beyond him, did his kindly best.
“It’s all right, you know,” he found himself assuring her earnestly. “It’s really all right. I know—I know—it’s most beastly luck. But it’s all right——”