If only she had been more with them, had taught them to know her better! In those hours she accused herself of neglecting her children, of leaving them too much to the care of others while she absented herself upon their business. She begrudged, as mothers of dead children begrudge, every necessary moment she had spent away from them. What things were they saying in there, what things were they thinking of their mother?
At last she went upon her knees beside the door, her ear shamelessly at the keyhole. Jemima heard her there, and opened.
She said coldly, "You might have come in, if you wanted so much to hear what we were saying. The door was not locked. We have been deciding where we shall go."
Kate got with difficulty to her feet. "Where you shall go?" she repeated.
Then she thought she understood. Jemima had remembered the terms of her father's will, by which in case of her mother's re-marriage the property of Storm was forfeit.
"Oh, but daughter!"—the words tumbled over each other in their eagerness to be out. "You need not trouble about that! Losing Storm won't matter. You lose only what your father left, and I have doubled that—trebled it. Besides, there is the little property that came to me from my parents. I've always meant, when I married, to give you more than my marriage would cost you. That is why I have worked so hard, and saved. Perhaps you thought me miserly, grasping? I know people do. But that is why. The money is to be yours, all yours and Jacqueline's—at once, not after I die. We shall need very little, Jacques and I. Just a start somewhere—"
The girl stopped the hurrying words with a gesture of some dignity. "We have not thought about the money part yet, Mother. We were simply deciding where to live now."
"To live?" The words were puzzled.
"Yes. Surely you don't expect us to go on living with you and our father's murderer?"
Kate groped at the wall behind her for support. Here was a thing she had not thought of. She had known that she might lose her children's respect, perhaps, temporarily, their love; but she had counted unconsciously upon the force of daily habit, of companionship, of her own personal magnetism, to win back both, as she had won them from others. Deprived of their companionship, what chance had she? They were lost to her, utterly. Yet not even in that bitter moment did it occur to her that she might fail the man who was coming back to her out of his living death.