Christopher nodded, the point almost insufferably distasteful to him.
"Oh, I know it!" Alice said.
"You know it?" the man echoed, almost in displeasure.
"Yes, she told me herself! But of course that was years later. At the time, all I knew was that Kate Sheridan came home, and came to see me at school, and told me that Mama and Annie were very well, but that Annie had been frightfully sick, and that Mama wouldn't come back until Annie was much stronger. As a matter of fact, it was nearly two years—Theodore took me over to them a year from that following summer, and then Annie stayed with some friends in England; she was having a wonderful time! But years afterward, when little Hendrick was coming, in fact, she was here one day, and she seemed to feel blue, and finally I happened to say that if motherhood seemed so hard to a person like herself, whose husband and whose whole family were so mad with joy over the prospect of a baby, what on earth must it be to the poor girls who have every reason to hate it. And she looked at me rather oddly, and said: 'Ah, I know what that is!' Of course I guessed right away what she meant, and I said: 'Annie—not really!' And she said: 'Oh, yes, that was what started my illness. I had been so almost crazy—so blue and lonesome, and so sick with horror at the whole thing, that it all happened too soon, the day after Mama and Kate got there, in fact!' And then she burst out crying and said: 'Thank God it was that way! I couldn't have faced that.' And she said that she had been too desperately ill to realize anything, but that afterward, at Como, when she was much better, she asked Mama about it, and Mama said she must only be glad that it was all over, and try to think of it as a terrible dream!"
"Well, there you are," said Chris, "she herself says that no child was born!"
"Yes, but, Chris, mightn't it be that she didn't know?" Alice submitted, timidly.
Her husband eyed her with a faint and thoughtful frown.
"It seems to me that that is rather a fantastic theory, dear! Where would this child be all this time?"
"Kate" Alice said, simply.
"Kate!" he echoed, struck. And Alice saw, with a sinking heart, that he was impressed. After a full moment of silence he said, simply: "You think this is the child?"