“But I do care for you. Perhaps not quite the way you care, Joe, but I've been through such a lot. I can't seem to feel anything terribly. I just want peace.”
“I could give you that,” he said eagerly.
Edith smiled. Peace, in that noisy house next door, with children and kittens and puppies everywhere! And yet it would be peace, after all, a peace of the soul, the peace of a good man's love. After a time, too, there might come another peace, the peace of those tired women in the ward, rocking.
“If you want me, I'll marry you,” she said, very simply. “I'll be a good wife, Joe. And I want children. I want the right to have them.”
He never noticed that the kiss she gave him, over the sleeping baby, was slightly tinged with granulated sugar.
CHAPTER LI
OLD Anthony's body had been brought home, and lay in state in his great bed. There had been a bad hour; death seems so strangely to erase faults and leave virtues. Something strong and vital had gone from the house, and the servants moved about with cautious, noiseless steps. In Grace's boudoir, Howard was sitting, his arms around his wife, telling her the story of the day. At dawn he had notified her by telephone of Akers' murder.
“Shall I tell Lily?” she had asked, trembling.
“Do you want to wait until I get back?”