“Must you, mother?” she said quietly, but with a sharpness she was wholly unaware of. Then she added as she smoothed out the paper, “Will it do any good? You’ve read the story till—till you’re nigh sick. You’ve read it till I just can’t bear seeing you read it any longer. I guess I’ll need to burn it if I don’t want to have you set crazy.”
But she made no attempt to burn the paper, and all her courage seemed to fade completely out as her mother raised to hers a pair of eyes that were filled with a world of piteousness.
The latter shook her greying head.
“I won’t go crazy, child,” she said in a low, monotonous voice. “Give me time, dear. You see, he was my boy—my Jim. He was everything to me—my son, and—and he’s gone.”
Something stirred in the girl—something suddenly spurred her. It was an expression of youthful hope, which, in calmer moments, she would have realised was ill-enough founded.
“But has he?” she demanded, almost vehemently. “You don’t know—we don’t know! You’ve read that story till you can’t read it right. Our judgment’s been snowed under in the scare of it. That’s so, sure! What is it? Why, it’s just a news story,” she cried, flinging scornful emphasis into her tone. “It’s a fool news story they love to scare folks with, an’ later they’ll contradict it without pity for the worry and grief it’s caused to the folks who’ve read it. I’ve thought and thought and I tell you it’s—it’s not real. I don’t believe he’s dead. Here, I’ll show you. I’ll read it. You sit there and just listen. Will you? Then you’ll see.”
She smoothed the paper again and moved away to the open doorway. Then she read in a strident voice and commented as she read:
“‘Disaster at Sea? Urgent SOS.’
“That’s the headline, mum dear, and there’s a question marked against it,” she cried. “You get that? Even the paper asks the question.”
The girl had looked up. She was urgently regarding the figure at the stove. She was seeking a sign and seemed to find it in the fact that her mother had sat up.