One windy afternoon in the early spring she came to the library and led him, with a firm step, to the child’s room, where they sat without speaking until the low breathing ceased with a flutter.
“It is over,” she explained, in a matter-of-fact voice. She took a little shawl and laid it softly over the child as if it might be cold. Then she rested the head gently on the pillow and stood quietly looking at her child.
“Adela.” Wilbur had put an arm about her waist to comfort her. His eyes were wet. She looked at him blankly, wonderingly.
“It is over,” she repeated slowly, looking back at the child. Then disentangling herself from her husband’s arm she said “Come,” and opened the door.
Wilbur followed, amazed and hurt, feeling that his attempts to be near her in their trouble had been repulsed. Her mood was the same the next day when he had kissed her and spoken hopefully of the life that was yet before them. If bereaved now, checked in their full tide of possession, why, the years would bring them other children. Theirs was a common grief.
She had looked at him vacantly, as if he had been talking of an outsider, or some small possession that had been and now was gone to be replaced by another. “It is over,” she repeated, “gone.” She wondered if he could understand that some things went, never to return.
Thus he had his grief, a good, honest grief, his tears and his sentiment over his firstborn. Then hopeful physical sanity, the round of living, obliterated the slight scar. But the event left him with a sore, puzzled feeling over his wife. She had been growing so stately, so cold and forbidding. Tacked away in his mind was a memory of the talk at Remsen’s, and something told him that his trouble dated from that night.
He was wrong. It dated some generations back, and it mattered little when the breach declared itself. It was there, and widening in little ways. It was a relief to him when, a few weeks after the child’s death, his wife brought about a business talk.
“You know Uncle Seb left me almost all his money?” Wilbur nodded.
“It’s in bricks, and for some personal reasons I don’t think I care to disturb it. It might have been for the child, you know, and now it can lie until I see my way to using it. But I should like to use my own fortune, if you can convert the investments to cash.”