"I tell you he can't bear to hear her name!"
"But he doesn't know why she has left him."
Mr. Langhope gathered his brows in a frown. "Why—what on earth—what possible difference would that make?"
Mrs. Ansell, from the doorway, shed a pitying glance on him. "Ah—if you don't see!" she murmured.
He sank back into his seat with a groan. "Good heavens, Maria, how you torture me! I see enough as it is—I see too much of the cursed business!"
She paused again, and then slowly moved a step or two nearer, laying her hand on his shoulder.
"There's one thing you've never seen yet, Henry: what Bessy herself would do now—for the child—if she could."
He sat motionless under her light touch, his eyes on hers, till their inmost thoughts felt for and found each other, as they still sometimes could, through the fog of years and selfishness and worldly habit; then he dropped his face into his hands, hiding it from her with the instinctive shrinking of an aged grief.