"Oh Honour! what an awful thing this is!" breathed Mrs. Darling.
"It's more than awful," answered Honour. "I suppose I shall get over it sometime, if I live: I don't know. Perhaps God will be pleased to take me."
She spoke almost with the unnatural calmness of her mistress. That alone would have told of something mentally wrong, or becoming so.
"Honour--indeed I don't wish to reproach you, for I'm sure your pain must be too great to need it; but I must speak--how could you leave the child alone with that lighted candle?"
"Will you see him?--what's left of him?" was the rejoinder. And without waiting for reply, Honour went into the nursery. Something was resting there on trestles with a sheet thrown over it. Whether it was a coffin, whether it was not, Mrs. Darling did not stay to inquire. She arrested Honour's hand.
"No," she said. "I don't know that I could bear the sight."
Honour dropped the corner of the sheet again. "Well," she said, "he is there; my darling treasure that was dearer to me than anything in life. They were beating him black and blue in the dining-room, and I brought him out, and I finished the paper toy to soothe and comfort his poor little sobbing heart, and I did leave him alone with it, the candle lighted inside it. If I ever forget my folly, or cease to mourn for it in repentance, I hope God will forget me. But, I am not the sole author of his death; Mrs. Darling, I am not. Those who came and fastened the doors upon him, and so let him burn, are more guilty of it than me."
"Hush, Honour! You were mistaken. The doors could not have been so fastened."
Honour laid her hand upon the sheet again, touching what was beneath it.
"Mrs. Darling, don't you be deceived. Some do not believe what I say, and some are wishing to hush the matter up. I swear that it was as I assert: I swear it by this, all that's left of him. They say Benja must have buttoned the one door himself; let it go so: I don't think he did, but let it go so: but he could not have bolted the other on the outside. They are hushing the matter up; and I must do the same: I am only one against many."