“How can I do that? I should be ashamed”—
“But you mustn’t,” she entreated. “It would put others in danger, too. You would carry the infection. You must go,” she repeated.
“Well, I shall come again. I must know how it is with you. When may I come again!”
“I don’t know. You mustn’t come inside again.” She thought a moment. “If you come I will speak to you from that window over the door. You must keep outside. If you will ring the bell twice, I shall know it is you.”
She shut the door, and left him no choice but to obey. It was not heroic; it seemed cowardly; and he turned ruefully away. But he submitted, and twice a day, early in the morning and late at night, he came and rang for her. The neighbors, such as cared, understood that he was the friend of the family who connected its exile with the world; sometimes the passers mistook these sad trysts for the happy lovers’ meetings which they resembled, and lingered to listen, and then passed on.
They caught only anxious questions and hopeless answers; the third morning that Ray came, Peace told him that the little ones were dead.
They had passed out of the world together, as they had entered it, and Ray stood with their mother beside the grave where they were both laid, and let her cling to his hand as if he were her brother. Her husband was too sick to be with them, and there had been apparently no question of Hughes’s coming, but Peace was there. The weather was that of a day in late March, bitter with a disappointed hope of spring. Ray went back to their door with the mourners. The mother kept on about the little ones, as if the incidents of their death were facts of a life that was still continuing.
“Oh, I know well enough,” she broke off from this illusion, “that they are gone, and I shall never see them again; perhaps their father will. Well, I don’t think I was so much to blame. I didn’t make myself, and I never asked to come here, any more than they did.”
She had the woe-begone hopeless face which she wore the first day that Ray saw her, after the twins had thrown her porte-monnaie out of the car window; she looked stunned and stupefied.
They let her talk on, mostly without interruption. Only, at this point Peace said, “That will be thought of, Jenny,” and the other asked, wistfully, “Do you think so, Peace? Well!”