* * * * *
We walked back together from the cemetery across Paris, and he opened his heart to me. At first, it was difficult. There is a certain restrictive bar that interposes when there is this intimacy of family connections. It is easier, often, to unburden one’s self to a stranger. Alan’s death had upset him more than it had me, in my acquired fatalism. It was his first contact with the closed mystery and as always, I think, his thoughts had leaped ahead to his own appointed hour. Yet in this supposition I had not entirely done him justice.
“God, how terrible death is!” he broke out nervously, at last.
“It’s not death; it’s life you’re experiencing,” I said solemnly.
“What do you mean?”
“Life, Ted, is just this: readiness to face the end at any moment, our own and those who are dear to us. We aren’t taught these things at home: nothing prepares us. We can’t believe it till it comes, as a shock.”
“Yes, that’s so,” said the boy, pulling at his cuff, for he is only a boy. “I can’t get it out of my mind; I feel jumpy all over.”
“It’s tough, damned tough.”
“Mr. Littledale,” he said abruptly, “do you blame me for marrying Molly as I did?”