“It’s going to hurt him badly,” she said. “And my baby... My poor little innocent baby!”
Hallam had nothing to say to that. The culminating disaster, the biggest and most appalling of the difficulties with which they were faced, was wrought by the existence of the child. He sat, gripping her hand hard, speechless and immeasurably disconcerted. What was there to say in face of her distress?
“I can’t think,” she said. “I’m all confused. This changes everything. I don’t know what to do. I don’t feel that I can go home. I haven’t got a home...”
She reflected awhile.
“George will have to be told. That is the part which is going to hurt. I can’t bear to think of it.”
“I’ll tell him,” Hallam said.
“No; not you.”
She spoke with a sort of repressed vehemence, and drew her hand from his, and sat with it clenched on the desk in front of her, her face working painfully.
“Oh! whatever made me do it?” she cried. “Why was I not satisfied to live with my memories? All this distress is of my making. Why did I do it?”
“God knows!” he returned with sudden bitterness. “If you had died, your memory would have been sacred to me.”