He turned his face away and bent over the manuscript. Tears had come out of his own eyes, and were wetting his face. Impossible for any one to conceive the torments of his nights in bed with his beloved one and estranged from her. That turning of backs, that cold space between their two unhappy bodies....
‘Wretched, wretched woman,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun again, more bitterly than ever, for she saw her son’s tears.
‘Yes. But we must think of Virginia.’
‘Has she been writing to her mother?’
‘I am sure she has not. She would do nothing without my knowledge.’
He dug the nib of his pen into the blotting-paper.
‘My wife is the soul of loyalty and straightness——’ he began, but his voice quivering uncontrollably at the mention of her dear qualities, he broke off.
‘Yes indeed, Stephen. Indeed I know it. She is the dearest child. Only at these times a woman isn’t quite herself, and Virginia, I can see, has got into a curious morbid state——’
‘I should leave her alone, mother,’ interrupted Stephen, his head bent so that she couldn’t see his face.
Mrs. Colquhoun was hurt. All her affection and sympathy being thrown back, as it were, at her,—told straight by her son, to whose welfare she had devoted the whole of her life, that she was taking the wrong line with Virginia. As though she didn’t know better than he could what was the right line to take with some one in Virginia’s condition!