‘Better not, I think,’ he whispered back.
Alone with Virginia he took her on his knee. She was holding the telegram she had just written, and was in a hurry to go and send it off.
‘Yes, Stephen—what is it?’ she asked, fretted at being held back, and worried by this strange silence of her mother’s to the point of being unlike herself.
‘I am but a clumsy creature,’ he began, overwhelmed by the thought of the blow about to be delivered—and delivered by his hand, too, his own loving hand.
He laid his head on her breast, his arms round her, as she sat on his knee.
This beginning made Virginia still more uneasy; Stephen had never called himself a clumsy creature before. ‘What is it, darling?’ she asked, very anxious.
‘What is it not,’ groaned Stephen, holding her tight. To think it was he, he who so deeply loved her....
‘Oh, Stephen’—Virginia was thoroughly frightened—‘mother?’
‘Yes. Yes. Yours. And Virginia, my loved wife,’ he said, raising his head and looking at her, ‘believe me I had rather, to spare you, it were mine.’
Virginia sat like a stone. Her face was stiff and set. The worst had happened, then. Her little mother, her own sweet little mother, to whom she had been unkind, unloving, and who had never once failed in kindness and love to her, was dead.