“Why didn’t you write, so that things could have been got ready for you?”
“I don’t know. I was too unhappy. Seer Marcous—” she said after a little pause and then stopped.
“Yes?”
“I am going to have a baby.”
She said it in the old, childlike way, oblivious of difference of sex; with her little foreign insistence on the final consonants. I glanced hurriedly at her. The fact was obvious. She stood with her hands helplessly outspread. The pathos of her would have wrung the heart of a devil.
“Thank God, you’ve come home,” said I, huskily.
She began to cry softly. I put my arm round her shoulders, and comforted her. She sobbed out incoherent things. She wished she had never seen Pasquale. I was good. She would stay with me always. She would never run away again.
I took her upstairs, and opened the door of her room with the key that I had carried for a year on my bunch, and turned on the electric light.
“See what are still usable of your old things,” said I, “and I will send Antoinette up to you.”
She looked around her, somewhat puzzled.