“The—the contralto.”
“She died—she died in childbirth.”
“But—but Mr. Pentland?” inquired Mrs. Simpson in an uncertain voice. “Didn’t he—marry her?”
“How could he?” Eugene answered with calm logic. “He was married to someone else.”
And casting his head back, suddenly he sang: “You know I’m in love with some-boddy else, so why can’t you leave me alone?”
“Well, I never!” Mrs. Simpson stared dumbly into the fire.
“Well, hardly ever,” Eugene became allusively Gilbertian. “She hardly ever has a Big, Big B.” And he sang throatily: “Oh, yes! Oh, yes, in-deed!” relapsing immediately into a profound and moody abstraction, but noting with delight that Genevieve and her mother were looking at him furtively, with frightened and bewildered glances.
“Say!” The boy, whose ponderous jowl had been sunken on his fist for ten minutes, now at length distilled a question. “Whatever became of your father? Is he still living?”
“No!” said Eugene, after a brief pause, returning suddenly to fact. “No! He’s still dying.”
And he fixed upon them suddenly the battery of his fierce eyes, lit with horror:
“He has a cancer.” After a moment, he concluded: “My father is a very great man.”
They looked at him in stricken bewilderment.
“Gee!” said the boy, after another silence. “That guy’s worse than our old man!”
“Jimmy! Jimmy!” whispered Genevieve scathingly.
There was a very long, for the Simpson family, a very painful, silence.
“Aha! Aha!” Eugene’s head was full of ahas.
“I suppose you have thought it strange,” Mrs. Simpson began with a cracked laugh, which she strove to make careless, “that you have never seen Mr. Simpson about when you called?”
“Yes,” he answered with a ready dishonesty, for he had never thought of it at all. But he reflected at the same moment that this was precisely the sort of thing people were always thinking of: suddenly before the embattled front of that little family, its powers aligned for the defence of reputation, he felt lonely, shut out. He saw himself looking in at them through a window: all communication with life grouped and protected seemed for ever shut off.
