When they were shut up in the carriage together she sat shuddering for a moment, he shuddering, also, at the sight of the face he had hidden; then she trembled into his arms, clung to his shoulder, cowered down and hid herself upon his knee, slipped down kneeling upon the floor of the carriage, and clung to him with both her arms.
"I never told you that I was a wicked woman," she said. "I will tell you now; always—always I have tried to hide that it was Philip—Philip!"—
"Poor child!" he said. "Poor, unhappy—most unhappy child!" All the strength of her body seemed to have gone into the wild clasp of her slender arms.
"I have suffered," she said. "I have been broken; I have been crushed. I knew that I should never see him again, but he was alive. Do you think that I shall some day have been punished enough?"
He clasped her close to his breast, and laid his gray head upon her brown one, shedding bitter tears.
"We do not know that this is punishment," he said.
"No," she answered. "We do not know. Take me home to my little children. Let me stay with them. I will try to be a good mother—I will try"—
She lay in his arms until the carriage stopped. Then they got out and went into the house. When they closed the door behind them, and stood in the hall together, the deadly silence smote them both. They did not speak to each other. The professor supported her with his arm as they went slowly up the stairs. He had extinguished the light below before they came up. All the house seemed dark but for a glow of fire-light coming through an open door on the first landing. It was the door Philip Tredennis had seen open the first night when he had looked in and had seen Bertha sitting in her nursery-chair with her child on her breast.
There they both stopped. Before the professor's eyes there rose, with strange and terrible clearness, the vision of a girl's bright face looking backward at him from the night, the light streaming upon it as it smiled above a cluster of white roses. And it was this that remained before him when, a moment afterward, Bertha went into the room and closed the door.