He dropped the paper, and turned to her. “Julie! Honey!” he cried. “Julie, don’t take it so hard! She was just a crazy old woman: anything would have made her do it!”
Julie raised her ghastly face, staring at him. “She was my child,” she said, “and I’ve killed her. Oh, you don’t know; but she was like my own child. She was in the dark, an’ sufferin’. I had so much happiness—I thought it would give her life. Instead—”
“Julie, she was crazy!” he pleaded.
Her eyes, though she still stared at him, were remote, fixed upon an inward picture.
“Tim,” she said. “It was all over the clean waist I pressed for her—all over it. I’ve killed her. And—and Elizabeth too, she was crying.”
“Elizabeth! Her tears—” he broke in violently, but she silenced him.
“No, don’t speak now; don’t. Let me alone. I’ve got to be by myself and think it all out alone. I’ve got to think.” She rose unsteadily.
She stood looking at him one moment more, dumbly, uncertainly, groping perhaps to find something for his consolation, but she found nothing, and in the end she evaded his outstretched arms, murmured blindly, “I got to be alone—I got to think it all out,” and passed from the kitchen and through to the dark of the sitting-room, where she shut the door fast behind her.
He sank down in a chair and sat on all alone in the room, where the lights were bright and the supper still waited upon the table in festive expectancy. Every now and then his eyes traveled around the room with its air of frozen gayety, but always they returned to the floor, and so he remained, his legs stretched out in front of him, his hands driven into his pockets, and his head bowed.
He sat there a long time until his legs grew stiff and went to sleep. Then he stirred uneasily, drawing them in, and looking again at the waiting meal.