“Yes, I know this sudden move looks rather insane, but I have been thinking it over for some time. The child is Humphrey’s, it has a right to be born in the home of its father, and—and—I cannot go without you!”
“I shouldn’t dream of letting you, my Gwen, only you took me by surprise. Mary will go too, of course, but what about your father?”
Gwen looked disturbed.
“I don’t know. Do you think my going or staying will make much difference to him?”
“I do, dear, a very great difference, but he will think as I do, now you have spoken, that you are doing right. When we are away John will be with him every moment he can spare.”
“As if I didn’t know that!” Gwen said. “I will tell him to-night.”
To the amazement of them all, Mr. Waring, as soon as he had grasped the situation, rose to it in a quite remarkable way; the proceeding on Gwen’s part struck him as most fit and proper, and he braced himself up to support her. He also announced his intention of accompanying the cortège.
In the first shock of his resolve Gwen winced; the fact of carrying him in her train and on such an errand brought a spice of ludicrousness into the affair that seemed to her ghastly.
The day before they started she surprised him in the study, grasping in one hand a heap of manuscript in her mother’s pretty hand-writing and reading with knit brows a copy of Chavasse’s “Advice to a Mother.”
This was too much for Gwen, she escaped to her room, and cried and laughed, and cried and laughed again in a perfect paroxysm of grief and piteous amusement.