Afterwards, it seemed to her that the sorrow in his face had told her, and that she knew his message before he spoke.
Mrs. Davis had not broken into loud weeping when she heard her husband's fate, and she was very calm, when John saw her again, after all had been done which was needful for the dead; only moving nervously about, trying to put the room into an unusual order. John could not bear to leave her; knowing what love is, his sympathy for her grief was almost grief itself; yet he had said all that he could say to comfort her, all that he could of Tom's bravery in rushing into the fire, and it seemed useless to stay. But as he rose to go, putting the child, who had fallen asleep in his arms, down on the bed, Mrs. Davis stopped him.
She stood straightening the sheet which covered Tom's face, creasing its folds between her fingers, and pulling it a little on this side or that.
"Mr. Ward," she said, "he was drunk, Tom was."
"I know it," he answered gently.
"He went out with some money this forenoon," she went on; "he was to buy some things for the young ones. He didn't mean to drink; he didn't mean to go near the saloon. I know it. Mrs. Shea, she came in a bit after he went, and she said she seen him comin' out of the saloon, drunk. But he didn't mean it. Then you brought him home. But, bein' started, preacher, he could not help it, an' he'd been round to Dobbs's again, 'fore he seen the fire."
"Yes," John said.
Still smoothing the straight whiteness of the sheet, she said, with a tremor in her voice:—
"If he didn't want to, preacher—if he didn't mean to—perhaps it wasn't a sin? and him dying in it!"
Her voice broke, and she knelt down and hid her face in the dead man's breast. She did not think of him now as the man that beat her when he was drunk, and starved the children; he was the young lover again. The dull, brutal man and the fretful, faded woman had been boy and girl once, and had had their little romance, like happier husbands and wives.