"Yes, yes, my love, so terribly alone."
"Alone, alone," he repeated. "I am so selfish. I can think of nothing but my own loneliness. I can't think of her."
"Well, never heed, my dear, my own dear. She wouldn't want you to worry."
"Oh, but I must think this out!" he exclaimed in a shocked, dreary tone. "It's so important...." He looked up at the electric light and grumbled: "Oh, that damned light makes it worse!" and rose to restore the room to the sallowness of the morning.
When he sat down again he would not eat, but leaned his head on his hands and his elbows on the table and watched the other two. Poppy was saying in tones half-maternal, half-disagreeable: "Eat up your 'am, you silly cuckoo. You know if you don't you'll have one of your sick turns," and Roger was obeying. Tears and the ham collided noisily in his throat.
Richard withdrew his eyes from them and looked secretively at Ellen. "She killed herself, of course," he said in an undertone.
"Oh no!" she cried. "Oh no!"
But there sounded through the room a thunderclap of memory. There had been words drawled there the night before that now detonated in Ellen's mind.... "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over me?"
"Oh no!" she cried again, lest he should take notice that she was deafened and dizzied and ask why. "Never think that of her, my dearie."
She had thought the woman strident and hysterical and thoughtless for persisting in her plans for the next day in face of her own faint, barely acquiescent smiles, and a poor, feckless, fashionless housewife for thrusting those unwanted saucepans on the cook. But these had been alibis she had sought to establish that she might clear her soul of a charge of lingering at the brink of dark waters, lest Richard should understand her sacrifice and grieve.