"No, dear!" She stroked his sleeve, not lifting her pitifully reddened eyelids, and then he felt her start. "Uncle Owen!" Her hand clenched upon his arm, and her tear-blurred eyes sought his. "I must tell you.... He had news to give me to-day—of Bawne!"
"Nothing worse, thank God!—than what I know already," Saxham commented when she had told. He stood in silence a moment, mastering himself, and the electric hall-light showed in his harsh square visage the ravages that grief had wrought.
"How you have suffered! If only I could do something to comfort you!" she muttered. "And Lynette. Do you know—there are days"—a sob caught her breath—"when I daren't even look at Lynette."
"It is so with me!" His voice was deep and quiet and sorrowful. "Old Webster probed deep with his Elizabethan goose-quill, when he wrote of the
"Greyfe that wastyth a faire woman
Even as wax doth waste yn flame."
Pray for us both, my dear, and believe that you are a comfort to us."
She said with a laugh that was half a sob: "I might have made a hole in the water at Seasheere, or jumped out of the train on the way back, I daresay, but for the thought of you both. Or, if it wasn't that stopped me, my joss was on the job."
"I had rather say your Guardian Angel."
"Do you think any self-respecting Guardian Angel could possibly bother about a regular bad egg like me?"
"Mine did—when my wife married me and I was a peculiarly bad egg."