I made some cry of pain, and Aunt Bridget said:
"Oh, I know what you're going to say—why doesn't he wait? I'll tell you why if you'll promise not to whisper a word to any one. Your father is a sick man, my dear. Let him say what he likes when Conrad talks about cancer, he knows Death's hand is over him. And thinking it may fall before your time has come, he wants to take time by the forelock and see a sort of fulfilment of the hope of his life—and you know what that is."
It was terrible. The position in which I stood towards my father was now so tragic that (wicked as it was) I prayed with all my heart that I might never look upon his face again.
I was compelled to do so. Three days after Aunt Bridget's visit my father came to see me. The day was fine and I was walking on the lawn when his big car came rolling up the drive.
I was shocked to see the change in him. His face was ghastly white, his lips were blue, his massive and powerful head seemed to have sunk into his shoulders, and his limbs were so thin that his clothes seemed to hang on them; but the stern mouth was there still, and so was the masterful lift of the eyebrows.
Coming over to meet me with an uncertain step, he said:
"Old Conrad was for keeping me in bed, but I couldn't take rest without putting a sight on you."
After that, and some plain speech out of the primitive man he always was and will be (about it's being good for a woman to have children because it saved her from "losing her stomach" over imaginary grievances), he led me, with the same half-contemptuous tenderness which he used to show to my mother, back to the house and into the drawing-room.
Alma and her mother were there, the one writing at a desk, the other knitting on the sofa, and they rose as my father entered, but he waved them back to their places.
"Set down, ma'am. Take your seat, mother. I'm only here for a minute to talk to my gel about her great reception."