“Then? Then—WHAT, Jimmie?” The clutch on his arm was like a vise.
“They got it,” he said. It was like a death sentence that he pronounced. “It is destroyed.”
She did not speak or move—save that her hands, as though nerveless and without strength, fell away from his arms, and dropped to her sides. It was dark there under the stoop, though not so dark but that he could see her face. It was gray—gray as death. And there was misery and fear and a pitiful helplessness in it—and then she swayed a little, and he caught her in his arms.
“Gone!” she murmured in a dead, colourless way—and suddenly laughed out sharply, hysterically.
“Don't! For God's sake, don't do that!” he pleaded wildly.
She looked at him then for a moment in strange quiet—and lifted her hand and stroked his face in a numbed way.
“It—it would have been better, Jimmie, wouldn't it,” she said in the same monotonous voice, “it would have been better if—if I had never found out anything, and they—they had done the same to me that they did to—to father.”
“Marie! Marie!” It was the first time he had ever spoken her name, and it was on his lips now in an agony of tenderness and appeal. “Don't! You mustn't speak like that!”
“I'm tired,” she said. “I—I can't fight any more.”
She did not cry. She lay there in his arms quite still—like a weary child.