“Is it over? Dick, is it over?” She flung her arms towards him; but he threw her from him almost brutally. “The man is dead, I tell you. His folly and his sin lie dead with him. I have nothing to do with you, nor you with me.”
“Dick!” she whispered. “Dick, cannot you understand? I must speak with you alone.”
But they did not understand, neither the man nor the child.
“Dick, are you really dead?” she cried. “Have you no pity for me? Do you think that I have followed you here to grovel at your feet for mere whim? Am I acting like a woman sane and sound? Don’t you see that I am mad, and why I am mad? Must I tell you before her? Dick—” She staggered towards him, and the fine cloak slipped from her shoulders; and then it was that Tommy changed from a child into a woman, and raised the other woman from the ground with crooning words of encouragement such as mothers use, and led her to the inner room. “Do not go,” she said, turning to Dick; “I shall be back in a few minutes.”
He crossed to one of the windows against which beat the City’s roar, and it seemed to him as the throb of passing footsteps beating down through the darkness to where he lay in his grave.
She re-entered, closing the door softly behind her. “It is true?” she asked.
“It can be. I had not thought of it.”
They spoke in low, matter-of-fact tones, as people do who have grown weary of their own emotions.
“When did he go away—her husband?”
“About—it is February now, is it not? About eighteen months ago.”