"There is one good thing," says the doctor. "It is a good thing that there was no child to suffer by our mistakes."
She raised her face when he said that, Miss Lucy did, and looked in his direction.
"You call that a good thing?" she says, in a kind of wonder. And after a minute she sighs. "Perhaps," she says, "you are right. Heaven only knows. Perhaps it WAS better that he died."
"DIED!" sings out the doctor.
And I hearn his chair scrape back, like he had riz to his feet sudden. I nearly busted my neck trying fur to see him, but I couldn't. I was all twisted up, head down, and the blood getting into my head from it so I had to pull it out every little while.
"Yes," she says, with her eyes wide, "didn't you know he died?" And then she turns quick toward Colonel Tom. "Didn't you tell him—" she begins. But the doctor cuts in.
"Lucy," he says, his voice shaking and croaking in his throat, "I never knew there was a child!"
I hears Colonel Tom hawk in HIS throat like a man who is either going to spit or else say something. But he don't do either one. No one says anything fur a minute. And then Miss Lucy says agin:
"Yes—he died."
And then she fell into a kind of a muse. I have been myself in the fix she looked to be in then—so you forget fur a while where you are, or who is there, whilst you think about something that has been in the back part of your mind fur a long, long time.