Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/336

 "She doesn't even know." And then, because he must tell her something, he said:

"No; not your mother, Marjorie. Billy!"

She jerked and drew the door farther open. "What's happened to him?"

"He's been hurt, Margy."

"Hurt? You mean, father, he's been—badly hurt!"

"Margy, he's dead."

"Dead," she repeated. "Billy dead." Of course it could not come to her; and what held it from reaching her as nearly as it otherwise might was that her father, upon seeing her, had become so queerly let down. "He's dead," he had said in strange, dull words, almost as if just remembering his news.

"Margy," he said her name again; and she stepped back into the room. "Come in here, father," she said, forgetting Clara in bed beside her.

He entered, ignoring that strange, dark-haired girl sitting up in the farther of the two beds; or rather, he saw her and accepted her as his daughter's companion. "Here is where Marjorie has been living," he thought, as he glanced about the room. "There is that girl from the slums—who Billy told me was from the slums—with whom Marjorie's been rooming." And his mind went blank about that girl; went blank now even about Marjorie, for about her he had made a mistake; and he jumped in his thought to his room at the club two mornings ago when Billy—big and red and violent in his strength—had told him of his daughter living here with this girl; and for the first time, Hale himself realized that Billy was dead.

"How is Billy dead?" Marjorie was saying to him; she had shut the door. "Father, what is it?"