“What is it, Olaf? Tell me what it is. Tell me!”
“Why, what do you mean by it?” he stammered.
“You know!” she exclaimed passionately. “Don’t let us hide it any longer. What is the matter with little Oscar, with our child?”
“What do you mean?” He was still looking for subterfuges.
“It wasn’t Dora. I knew he would do it some day, and I have tried to keep things that he could do harm with from him. I dreaded this. Something seized him,—something inside him,—and he snatched the knife out of her hand. When I got there, he was looking at the knife. It was—all bloody. Oh, Olaf! He was talking to himself. Then he dropped the knife, and he didn’t seem to remember. He is sleeping now, just as if it had never happened.”
“It’s just his fearful temper, Evelyn,” the man answered with an effort. “Dora irritates him, and the thundery air and all. You must pack up and get to the seashore or mountains, where it’s more bracing. He’s just nervous like you and me, only more so, because he’s smaller.”
She shook her head wearily. What was the use of self-deception? Hadn’t she watched this habit of rage for months? The child was a part of her; and more than she knew her hand or her foot she knew him. Doctors talked of nerves and diet. But she had seen the storms gather in the child and watched them burst.
“No! That is no use, Olaf. I can’t tell myself those things any more and be contented. It is worse!”
Simmons was walking up and down the room, hands thrust in his pockets, his face knit over the problem.
“All the world like old Oscar,” he muttered, talking to himself.