h Mercier."

"With _'im_--? _She_--"

Her face seemed suddenly to give way under his eyes, to become
discolored in a frightful pallor, to fall piteously into the lines of
age.

This face that his words had so crushed and broken looked up at him with
all its motherhood, mute yet vibrant, brimming in its eyes.

"Sit down, dear," she said. "You'll be tired standing."

He sat down, mechanically, in the nearest chair, bending forward,
contemplating his clenched hands. His posture put him at her mercy. She
came over to him and laid one hand on his shoulder; the other touched
his hair, stroking it. He shrank as if she had hurt him and leaned back.
She moved away, and took up a position in a seat that faced him. There
she sat and gazed at him, helpless and passive, panting a little with
emotion; until a thought occurred to her.

"Who's looking after the little children?"

"Winny--Winny Dymond."

"Why didn't you send for _me_, Ranny?"

"It was too late--last night."

"I'd have come, my dear. I'd have got out of me bed."

"It wouldn't have done any good."

There was a long pause.

"Were you alone in the house, dear?"

He looked up, angry. "Of course I was alone in the house."

She sat silent and continued to gaze at him with her tender, wounded
eyes.

Outside in the passage the front-door bell rang. She rose in
perturbation.

"That's them. Do you want to see them?"

"I don't care whether I see them or not."

She stood deliberating.

"You'd better--p'raps--see your uncle. I'll tell him, Ranny. Your
Father's not fit for it to-day."

"All right."

He rose uneasily and prepared himself to take it standing.

He heard them come into the shop, his Uncle and his Aunt Randall. He
heard his uncle's salutation checked in mid-career. He heard his
mother's penetrating whisper, then mutterings, commiserations. Their
communion lasted long enough for him to gather that his mother would
have about told them everything.

They came in, marking their shocked sense of it by soft shufflings at
the door of the parlor, his sanctuary. He felt obscurely that he had
become important to them, the chief figure of a little infamous tragedy.
He had a moment's intense and painful prescience of the way they would
take it; they would treat him with an excruciating respect, an awful
deference, as a person visited by God and afflicted with unspeakable
calamity.

And they did. It was an affair of downcast eyes and silent, embarrass