“I don’t know how you should have divined it—but I do: thank God that I am not! but sometimes I cannot help thinking what a terrible fate I might have had, but for the goodness of God—”
“Working through the wickedness of man.”
“Don’t raise such questions, James! Don’t make me think of it at all. I have been spared that fate, thank God, and saved for a very different one. It is very fantastic, but it gives me a feeling to the children—”
She had put out her hand to him, and he held it in his own. He gave it a grip, now, more loving than tender. “It gives me,” he said, “a feeling too.”
“Not of—dislike—not of——”
“What do you take me for, Evelyn? A man like me is often very fantastic, I allow, though nobody would think it. I am so touched by the thought that they might have been your children, and so glad of the escape we have had that they aren’t; and so sorry for them, poor things, for losing the best chance they could have had.”
At this curiously mixed statement of what was so real and true to the speakers, Evelyn laughed, with tears in her voice, pressing her husband’s hand. And then she said, “Now tell me, James, how you know?”
This was not so easy as her task. The middle-aged man of business blushed as youths and maidens are alone considered capable of doing. “Is it not enough that I might have guessed like Marion, or that Marion might have communicated her guess to me?”
“Anything is enough that you tell me,” she said.
“That drives all fiction out of my mouth. The reason I knew, Evelyn, was that I was there.”