The nurse, a small, sweet-faced, Scotch woman, who knew and admired Sue, wept. Some quality in his voice had touched the woman in her and the tears ran in a little stream down her cheeks. Sam continued talking, the woman’s tears helping him to regain his grip upon himself.
“My mother is dead,” he said, an old sorrow revisiting him. “I wish that you, like Mary Underwood, would be a new mother to me.”
When the time came that he could be taken to the room where Sue lay, his self-possession had returned to him and his mind had begun blaming the little dead stranger for the unhappiness of the past months and for the long separation from what he thought was the real Sue. Outside the door of the room into which she had been taken he stopped, hearing her voice, thin and weak, talking to Grover.
“Unfit—Sue McPherson unfit,” said the voice, and Sam thought it was filled with an infinite weariness.
He ran through the door and dropped on his knees by her bed. She turned her eyes to him smiling bravely.
“The next time we’ll make it,” she said.
The second child born to the young McPhersons arrived out of time. Again Sam walked, this time through the corridor of his own house and without the consoling presence of the sweet-faced Scotch woman, and again he shook his head at Doctor Grover who came to him consoling and reassuring.
After the death of the second child Sue lay for months in bed. In his arms, in her own room, she wept openly in the presence of Grover and the nurses, crying out against her unfitness. For several days she refused to see Colonel Tom, harbouring in her mind the notion that he was in some way responsible for her physical inability to bear living children, and when she got up from her bed, she remained for months white and listless but grimly determined upon another attempt for the little life she so wanted to feel in her arms.
During the days of her carrying the second baby she had again the fierce ugly attacks of temper that had shattered Sam’s nerves, but having learned to understand, he went quietly about his work, trying as far as in him lay to close his ears to the stinging, hurtful things she sometimes said; and the third time, it was agreed between them that if they were again unsuccessful they would turn their minds to other things.
“If we do not succeed this time we might as well count ourselves through with each other for good,” she said one day in one of the fits of cold anger that were a part of child bearing with her.