“Yes,” said Denton. Then he broke off. “She said, No! No! No!” He started up from the seat. “For their life, their life, their life! That was where the wrong was. I knew it was all wrong, always. Oh, my soul, my soul! What shall the atonement be?” He moved away, and at a few paces’ distance he began to run.
Ray watched him running, running, till he was out of sight.
He passed a restless, anxious day, and in the evening he could not keep from going to the Hugheses’. He found them all together, and gayer than he had seen them since the children’s death. He tried to join in the light-hearted fun that Mrs. Denton was making with her husband; she was unusually fond, and she flattered him with praises of his talent and good looks; she said his pallor became him.
“Do you know,” she asked Ray, “that we’re all going to New Hampshire to live on an abandoned farm?”
She made Denton get his violin, and he played a long time. Suddenly he stopped, and waited in the attitude of listening. He called out, “Yes!” and struck the instrument over a chair-top, breaking it to splinters. He jumped up as if in amaze at what had happened; then he said to Peace, “I’ve made you some kindling.”
His wife said with a smile, “A man must do something for a living.”
Denton merely looked at her with a kind of vague surprise. After a moment’s suspense he wheeled about and caught his hat from the wall, and rushed down the stairs into the street.
Hughes came in from the front room, with his pen in his hand, and hoarsely gasping. “What is the matter?” he weakly whispered. No one spoke, but the ruin of the violin answered for itself. “Some more of that fool’s work, I suppose. It is getting past all endurance. He was always the most unpractical creature, and of late, he’s become utterly worthless.” He kept on moving his lips as if he were speaking, but no sound came from them.
Mrs. Denton burst into a crowing laugh: “It’s too bad Ansel should have two voices and father none at all!”
The old man’s lips still moved, and now there came from them, “A fool, a perfect fool!”