So the days went on.
Sometimes he would sit in the study by himself for a little while. His racked nerves were soothed by solitude. Then he would think of the woman upstairs in the drawing-room, sitting alone. And he would go to her. She did not send him away. She did not leave him. She did nothing. She said nothing.
He began to be afraid. It would do her good, he said to himself, if she could cry. He wondered whether it was wise to leave her to her terrible torpor; whether he ought to speak to her. But he could not.
Yet she was kind to him for all her coldness. Once, when his grief was heaviest upon him, he thought she looked at him with anxiety, with pity. She came to him once, where he sat downstairs, alone. But though she came to him, she still kept him from her. And she would not go with him into the room where Peggy lay.
Now and then he wondered if she knew. He was not certain. He put the thought away from him. He was sure that for nearly three years she had not known anything. She had not known anything as long as she had had the child, when her knowing would not, he thought, have mattered half so much. It would be horrible if she knew now. And yet sometimes her eyes seemed to say to him: "Why not now? When nothing matters."
On the night before the funeral, the night they closed the coffin, he came to her where she sat upstairs alone. He put his hand on her shoulder and spoke her name. She shrank from him with a low cry. And again he wondered if she knew.
The day after the funeral she told him that she was going away for a month with Mrs. Gardner.
He said he was glad to hear it. It would do her good. It was the best thing she could do.
He had meant to take her away himself. She knew it. Yet she had arranged to go with Mrs. Gardner.
Then he was certain that she knew.