“Oh, Basil,” she looked up at him, “say you think it won’t be altogether bad for them! They will never know anything of their father now but what was good. And their mother will simply have vanished into the skies. They will think she has flown away to heaven—and who knows but it may be true? There may be something beyond this hell.”
“We shall soon know, Lucilla,” he answered gently.
“But to go away and leave them without a word—!” she moaned again. “Poor little things, poor little things!”
“They will remember you as something very dear and beautiful,” he said, as he knelt down beside her, and gathered her hands into his. “The very mystery will be like a halo about you.”
“Shall I see them again, Basil?” she moaned. “Tell me that.”
There was a moment’s silence.
Then, “Who knows?” the man said gravely. “Even to comfort you, I won’t say I am certain. But I do sincerely think you may.”
“You think,” she asked with a woeful smile, “there is a sporting chance?”
“More than that,” was Traherne’s emphatic reply. “This life is such a miracle—could any other be more incredible?”
“But even if I should meet them in another world,” she mourned, “they would not be my Ronny and Iris, but a strange man and a strange woman, built up of experiences in which I had had no share. Oh, it was cunning, cunning, what that devil said to me! He said, ‘God Himself cannot give you back their childhood.’”