“The child, Kate? Did you say the child?”
She did not answer at once, and then she muttered, with her head down, “Didn't I tell you there was something you had never guessed?”
“And is it that?” he said in a fearful whisper.
“Yes.”
“You are sure? You are not deceiving yourself? This is not hysteria?”
“No.”
“You mean that the child——”
“Yes.”
His questions had come in gasps, like short breakers out of a rising sea; her answers had fallen like the minute-gun above it. Then, in the silence, Pete's voice came through the wall. He was singing a rough old ditty—
“It was to Covent Gardens I chanced for to go,
To see some of the prettiest flowers which in the gardens grow.”