“What shall I do? Shall I tell my mother that you are to go to your home again this evening?”
She shook her head.
“No, thank you. In a way, they’re quite right. Frances would only cry, which would be bad for her.”
“Where is she now?” asked Ludovic.
“In the garden. She doesn’t know,” said Rosamund, colouring again, “about my listening at the door. She would think it dreadful, and I know it is—but somehow nothing seemed to matter except just to know what was going to be done with us.”
She looked mournfully at him and he saw her, bewildered and defenceless, thrust among alien standards and with all the foundations of her tiny world rocking. No wonder that in a suddenly revolutionized scale of values honour had seemed to count for less than the primitive instinct of self-defence.
“What can I do for you?” he said, almost unconsciously venting aloud the strong sense of impotent compassion that moved him.
“Oh,” she cried, “nobody can make things come right again—even God couldn’t, though I’ve prayed and prayed.”
“Do you mean—your mother?”
“My mother had to die,” she told him seriously. “She coughed and coughed every night, sometimes right on till the next morning. The night that she died, it was dreadful. She never stopped. I prayed for anything that might stop her coughing like that, and God answered the prayer by making her die. When I heard she wasn’t coughing any more, I thought it was all my prayers being answered, and I went to sleep, and then in the morning she came and told us that mother had died.”