“Ah! if we all had to pay so dearly for our mistakes!” she said, and brushed away the tears impatiently as they flowed freely over her cheeks. “But I don’t know why I reproach you. I felt once as you feel about it—and I let him see it. That was the beginning of our estrangement. I see things differently now. I see points of honour differently. Human beings can’t be classed and judged by a code. It is necessary to make distinctions. The individual has direct and special claims which you men drilled in a system don’t understand.”
“The judgment of human affairs is beyond human comprehension,” Colonel Grey said quietly.
“That is one way of evading responsibility,” she replied. “But we women understand these things—the mothers of the race. Even the childless woman is a mother, for the maternal instinct is the birthright of her sex. We mothers realise the needs of the children. Hugh was my child, and I allowed the mother-instinct to be swamped in the pride of the wife. I adopted the Army system, and judged him by your standard. I wasn’t true to my sex... And so we drifted apart... But he never attempted to justify himself to me. I wonder whether, if he had, I should have understood.”
He walked across to the window and stood there looking out. He felt distressed and troubled and extremely sorry for this woman in her anxiety with her burden of self-reproach.
“It is so hard,” the sorrowful voice went on tearfully, “to be facing this with the memory of all the years that have been wasted. If I had stood by him in his dark hour...”
Further utterance was stopped by the rush of tears that choked her. She dropped her head on her arms again, and for a while the only audible sounds were those made by her bitter weeping.
It was a distinct relief to Colonel Grey when the door opened to admit the doctor. He entered abruptly, closing the door behind him, an undersized, delicate-looking man, with an unattractive manner at variance with a pair of sympathetic eyes. The sympathetic eyes took in the scene rapidly. They were accustomed to scenes, and the sight of a woman’s tears failed to embarrass him. He took a chair, drew it up to the table opposite Zoë Lawless, and regarded her attentively as he sat down. She had raised her face at his entrance, and was vainly endeavouring to dry her tears.
“Don’t mind me,” he said bluntly. “Crying is often a relief. Let it come. You are Mr Lawless’ wife, I understand?”
She nodded, not trusting her voice, and looked at him appealingly. What was he going to tell her, this man in whose power it lay to pass sentence of death, or hold out hope of life?
“I understand further that you have had an interview with him which seems to have considerably excited him?”