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242 "The simple truth?"

"The simple truth."

"Yes, I can tell: you're not angry. But you were angry. . . ."

"Hush, Mamma, hush!"

"No, no, let me speak. I sent for you to speak to you. . . . There was a time when you were angry. And we could not talk together. Let us talk now, for the first and last time."

"Mamma . . ."

"There were those long, long years, dear. The years which are now all dead. . . . There was your suffering . . . but there was also our suffering, Father's . . . and mine."

"Yes. . . ."

"It was a day like to-day, gloomy and black; and it was raining. I was restless, I had such a strange presentiment: I had a presentiment . . . that Henri was dead, my child, my boy, in Rome. It was a gloomy day . . . seventeen or eighteen years ago. And in the afternoon, about this time—it was quite dark, the lights were not yet lit—a letter came: a letter from Rome . . . from Henri. . . . I trembled . . . I could not find the matches, to light the gas . . . and, when I looked for them, the letter dropped from my hands. . . . I thought, 'He's writing to me that he is very ill. I shall hear presently that he's dead.' I lit the gas . . . and read the letter. I read not that he was ill . ..