He looked at her mutely, put a hand to his throat, and turned away. It was too solemn, too poignant a scene for him to outrage it with words. Gwen, dead in life, would see her mother’s face no more.
Murchison was on the stairs when the blare of a tin trumpet seemed to hurt the silence of the little house. An impatient fist was beating a tattoo on the front door. It was the boy Jack come home from school.
Murchison’s mouth quivered, and then hardened. He went to the door, and opened it to a blast of the boy’s trumpet.
“Hallo, I say—”
A strong hand twisted the toy from the boy’s fingers.
“Silence.”
Jack Murchison’s mouth gaped. He looked at his father’s face, wonderingly, grievedly, and was awed into a frightened silence, child egoist that he was, by the expression in his father’s eyes.
Murchison pointed to the sitting-room door.
“Go and sit down.”
The boy obeyed, sullen and a little stupefied. His father closed and locked the door on him, and then passed out into the space behind the house that they called a garden. A few crocuses were gilding the sour, black earth. They were flowers that Gwen had planted before Christmas-time. And Murchison, as he looked at them, thought that she should take them in her little hands to the Great Father of all Children.