“You didn’t know?... then she’s left us?”
Mrs. Trenchard said nothing.
He cried: “I told him—what it would be—if he took her ... Katie!”
Then, his stick dropping with a rattle on to the stone floor, he fell back. Rocket caught him.
There was a movement forward, but Mrs. Trenchard, saying swiftly, “George ... Rocket,” had swept them all outside the figure—the figure of an old, broken, tumbled-to-pieces man, held now by his son and Rocket, huddled, with his white, waxen hand trailing across George Trenchard’s strong arm.
Harriet Trenchard said to her brother:
“You knew!” then turned up the stairs.
In the drawing-room Aunt Aggie, Aunt Betty, Millie and Henry faced Uncle Timothy.
“Well!” said Aunt Aggie, “so you know all about it.... You’ve killed Father!” she ended with a grim, malignant triumph.
He answered fiercely: “Yes, I knew. That’s why I came. She said that she would send up a note from the village. I thought that you wouldn’t have heard it yet. I came up to explain.”