She sat silent and continued to gaze at him with her tender, wounded eyes.
Outside in the passage the front-door bell rang. She rose in perturbation.
"That's them. Do you want to see them?"
"I don't care whether I see them or not."
She stood deliberating.
"You'd better—p'raps—see your uncle. I'll tell him, Ranny. Your Father's not fit for it to-day."
"All right."
He rose uneasily and prepared himself to take it standing.
He heard them come into the shop, his Uncle and his Aunt Randall. He heard his uncle's salutation checked in mid-career. He heard his mother's penetrating whisper, then mutterings, commiserations. Their communion lasted long enough for him to gather that his mother would have about told them everything.
They came in, marking their shocked sense of it by soft shufflings at the door of the parlor, his sanctuary. He felt obscurely that he had become important to them, the chief figure of a little infamous tragedy. He had a moment's intense and painful prescience of the way they would take it; they would treat him with an excruciating respect, an awful deference, as a person visited by God and afflicted with unspeakable calamity.