‘Poor child!’
‘I’m afraid I hurt her.’
‘Dick wouldn’t have liked it—but Dick’s gone.’ She looks a little wonderingly at him. After all these years, she can sometimes wonder a little still. ‘I suppose you will resume your evening paper!’
He answers quietly, but with the noble doggedness which is the reason why we write this chapter in his life. ‘Why not, Grace?’
She considers, for she is so sure that she must know the answer better than he. ‘I suppose it is just that a son is so much more to a mother than to a father.’
‘I daresay.’
A little gust of passion shakes her. ‘How you can read about the war nowadays!’
He says firmly to her—he has had to say it a good many times to himself, ‘I’m not going to give in.’ But he adds, ‘I am so sorry I was in the way, Grace. I wasn’t scouting you, or anything of that sort. It’s just that I can’t believe in it.’
‘Ah, Robert, you would believe if Dick had been to you what he was to me.’
‘I don’t know.’