"She'd like you to go in, Mrs. Spence, if you can spare the time. She took it quite quiet. 'Thank you, Sergeant,' says she. And never a question."
The two looked at each other and Desire saw her own doubt plainly reflected upon the honest gaze of Robert Timms.
"I'll go in," she said. "The doctor will take me home."
In the invalid's room there was only quietness. Miss Martin sat in her chair by the window; her plain, thin face had not sought to turn from the searching light. Desire felt her heart begin to beat with the beginnings of an understanding as new as it was revealing.
"Don't be sorry," Miss Martin's reassurance was instant. "I am glad to know.... I always did know, anyway ... and it did not make any difference ... If you can understand."
Desire nodded. "He must have been very wonderful," she said. In that new and nameless understanding she forgot that only that morning she had referred to the dead musician as a "derelict" and "no good for anything."
"Yes," said the invalid musing. "Not quite like the rest of us. And I see now that he never would have been. I used to think—but the difference was too deep. It was fundamental.... I feel ... as if he knew it ... and just wandered on."
"But you?" Desire ventured this almost timidly. The quietness seemed to intensify in the room. Then the invalid's voice, serene, distant.
"I? ... There is no hurry.... He has his fiddle, you see...." Miss Martin smiled and the smile held no bitterness. So might a mother have smiled over a thoughtless child who turns away from a love he is too young to value.
Desire was silent.