“Don’t,” said Nesta. “Don’t speak. Come in here.”
She took both their hands, dragged them into her father’s study, and shut the door.
“Look here, both of you,” she said, “I’ve been beast; I’ve been the lowest down sort of a girl that ever lived, but you have been a degree worse, and we have killed mother. Yes, we have killed her.”
Ethel dropped into a chair and clasped her side with one hand.
“You needn’t believe me, but it’s true. She was alone all the afternoon, and Marcia came home, and she saw mother, who was nearly gone, and the doctor is here and he is going to stay all night, and perhaps she’ll be dead in the morning, and we have done it—we are her own children and we have done it. You and Molly and I; we have all done it; we are monsters; we are worse than beasts. We are horrors. I hate us! I hate us! I hate us!”
Each hate as it was hurled from her young lips was uttered with more emphasis than the last, and now she flung herself full length on the carpet—the dirty, faded carpet, and sobbed as though her heart would break.
“We’re not to go to her—she won’t have any of us near her. She won’t have us now—we gave her up—she was alone all the afternoon, and now we are not to go to her, we are to stay away; that’s what we are to do.”
Molly was the first to recover her voice.
“It can’t be as bad as that,” she said.
Ethel looked up with a scared face. Molly’s face was just as scared as her sisters’. As she uttered the words she sank, too, in a limp fashion, on the nearest chair. Then she unpinned her hat and flung it from her to the farthest end of the room.