“How do you know that God is going to take their childhood from you?” he comforted her quickly. “You may be with them this very night—with them, unseen, but perhaps not unfelt, all the days of their life.”
She shook her head sadly. “You are saying that to make what poor Antony called a ‘haze’ for me—to soften the horror of darkness that is waiting for us. Don’t give me ‘dope’ Basil—I can face things without it.”
“I mean every word of it,” the man said stoutly.
They kept silence a little then.
The man almost wished that the summons would come.
Suddenly Lucilla Crespin smiled a little.
“Why,” he asked incredulously, “do you smile?”
“At a thought that came to me,” she told him; “the thought of poor Antony as a filmy and purified spirit. It seems so unthinkable!”
Traherne—even here—wished she had not said it. But he always had been fairer to Antony Crespin than, for years, the disillusioned wife had been able to be. “Why unthinkable?” he argued. “Why may he not still exist, though he has left behind him the nerves, the cravings, that tormented him—and you. You have often,” he reminded her gently, “told me that there was something fine in the depths of his nature. I have always known it. And you know how he showed it yesterday.”
“Oh, if I could only tell the children how he died!” Lucilla exclaimed longingly.