he must be told the truth
before ...

Once he knew it, would he love her any longer? Would he desire to make her
his wife? She knitted her brows and her fingers in anguish, and set her
little teeth. Possibly not. Probably not.

And supposing all went well and they were married. She had not realised
clearly, even when she talked of travelling abroad into the unknown,
conjectured world, what it would mean to go out from this, the first home
she had ever known, and leave the Mother. She caught her breath, and her
heart stopped at the thought of waking up one morning in a new, strange
country, and knowing that dear face thousands of miles away.

The loneliness drove her to daring. She reached out a timid hand, and laid
it upon the breast of the still, rigid, immovable figure beside her. Ah,
what a leaping, striving, throbbing prisoner was caged there! A faint sob
of surprise broke from her. Ah! what was it? what could it mean?

The faint sound she uttered plucked at the strings of that tortured heart.
The Mother turned, rose upon her elbow, leaned over the low dividing
barrier, took the slight body in her arms, and gathered it closely to her,
shielding it from the fangs of that coiled, formless Terror that
threatened in the dark. She felt how thin and light it was, and how frail
the arms were that clung about her, and how wasted was the face that
pressed against the coarse, conventual linen, covering the broad, deep
bosom whose chaste and hidden beauties Famine had not spared.

She would be a real mother once--just once. God would not grudge her that.
She bared her breast to the cheek with a sudden half-savage, wholly
maternal gesture, and drew it close and pillowed it and rocked it. Had
Heaven wrought a miracle and unsealed those white fountains of her
spotless womanhood, she would have found it sweet to give of herself to
Richard's starving child. But she had nothing but her great, indignant
pity and her boundless agony of love. Long hours after the face lay hushed
in sleep above her heart, and while the long, soft breaths of slumber went
and came, she lay staring out into the sinister blackness over the
beloved, menaced head.

Rain leaked through the tarpaulin over the ladder-hole, falling in heavy,
sullen gouts and splashes on the beaten earth below as blood drips from a
desperate wound. That image rose, and the blackness seemed all red--red
with those lines of fiery writing on it, smoking and crawling, flick