"May I tell you about my little girls?" he said.
"Will you?" Her smile was not the perfunctory one which had disheartened him sometimes. "I should like to have had a daughter," she added.
His shyness fell from him as he talked. He told her of Grace's beauty and her skill in dancing, he told her of Theresa's cleverness.
"No. No, I suppose you wouldn't call her pretty, but it doesn't seem to matter. Why, I hadn't even thought of it before. Theresa is not like other children."
This was what Clara had thought, but never said, of her own son.
"I have great hopes of her, but she is very young. One cannot tell yet how she will develop. But she shows signs of----"
"Hush!" Clara interrupted him on the verge of his precious revelation. They heard footsteps. Was it the dark night and the rough road that caused their loud unevenness?
"I think you'd better go to bed now," she said quietly. "Good-night."
"Good-night," he said, and went up the unlighted stairs. As he reached the landing a bedroom door was opened, and Alexander showed himself in his nightshirt.
"He has just come. I think," he whispered--"I think your mother wished us to be quiet."
"Hush!" said Alexander, "he'll hear nothing," and he banged his door.
Downstairs a key was turned in a lock, and the ashes were raked together in the grate. A few indistinguishable words floated up, and after a long pause there came the violent creaking of the stairs. It was a long time before Edward Webb could sleep.
Clara outwatched him. She lay in the extraordinary stillness to which she had trained herself, with patiently closed eyes and an untroubled brow, but there was the pain of controlled weeping in her throat. She had taught herself to keep her mind clear of regrets, of anger and scorn, that there might always be room for the flooding brightness of her love, but she had not yet learnt to keep back that hard, constricting hurt that stretched across her throat from ear to ear, and made a raw place in her breast.
At her side Rutherford turned, tossed, and ejaculated between his snatches of sleep.
"I tell you I haven't. Clara, are you angry with me? Look here, I hadn't been there for a month, you know I hadn't."
"I can't. Thoughts come crowding like black imps. If you'll forgive me----"