“You are lying to me,” she said in a dreadful voice. “He's dead!”
“He is not dead, Natalie.” He tried to put her into a chair, but she resisted him fiercely.
“Let me alone. I want to see that telegram.”
And, very reluctantly, at last he gave it to her. Graham was severely wounded. It was from a man in his own department at Washington who had just seen the official list. The nature of his wounding had not been stated.
Natalie looked up from the telegram with a face like a painted mask.
“This is your doing,” she said. “You wanted him to go. You sent him into this. He will die, and you will have murdered him.”
The thought came to him, in that hour of stress, that she was right. Pitifully, damnably right. He had not wanted Graham to go, but he had wanted him to want to go. A thousand thoughts flashed through his mind, of Delight, sleeping somewhere quietly after her day's work at the camp; of Graham himself, of that morning after the explosion, and his frank, pitiful confession. And again of Graham, suffering, perhaps dying, and with none of his own about him. And through it all was the feeling that he must try to bring Natalie to reason, that it was incredible that she should call him his own son's murderer.
“We must not think of his dying,” he said. “We must only think that he is going to live, and to come back to us, Natalie dear.”
She flung off the arm he put around her.
“And that,” he went on, feeling for words out of the dreadful confusion in his mind, “if—the worst comes, that he has done a magnificent thing. There is no greater thing, Natalie.”