But the appeal to the girl's pride went for once unheeded. "If they lied," she said tensely, "they must be punished for it. If they did not—Mother, what they said was that my father was not killed by accident. They said the man who killed him was Dr. Benoix. They said—why."
Kate moistened her lips. The time had come to speak, to explain what she could, to lie if necessary—anything to wipe out of her child's face that look of frozen horror.
But her tongue refused her bidding. She was hypnotized by the realization of her own utter folly. To have left such a discovery to chance! To have hoped that some impossible luck would keep her daughters in ignorance of her tragedy—and this in a rural community where nothing is ever forgotten, where every sordid detail of its one great scandal had been for years a household word!
The two stared at each other. Slowly the ruthless inquiry in the girl's eyes changed into fear, into a very piteous dismay. "Can't you deny—anything?" she whispered at last. "Mother! say it isn't so. I'll believe you."
She began to cry; not weakly with hidden face, but as a man cries, painful tears rolling unheeded down her cheeks, her shoulders heaving with hard sobs.
It came to Kate that never since her babyhood had she seen this child of hers in tears. She held out her arms, infinitely touched. "My dear, my baby!" she said. "Come here to Mother."
But the girl avoided her touch with a sort of shrinking. "All these years we've been trusting you, loving you, almost worshiping you—and you were that sort! Oh, Mother! Your husband's murderer—and his son coming and going about our house as if he were our brother. Those women said something about you and Philip, too,—but never mind that now. Will you tell me the truth, please? Before my father's death, you and—that man—loved each other?"
"Yes, Jemima, but—"
The girl silenced her. "And now that he is coming out of prison, you will go on—being lovers?"
Her mother answered quietly, "I shall marry him, dear, if that is what you mean."