And she had an urgent need for sympathy.
The unexpected knowledge that she was with child had overwhelmed her with strange hopes and unforeseen desires.
She felt weak, frightened a little, alone and very far from any friends.
That morning, though she cared little for her mother, she had had a sudden craving to be with her.
She needed help and consolation.
She did not love Walter, she knew that she never could, but at this moment she longed with all her heart for him to take her in his arms so that she could lay her head on his breast; clinging to him she could have cried happily; she wanted him to kiss her and she wanted to twine her arms around his neck.
She began to weep.
She had lied so much and she could lie so easily.
What could a lie matter when it could only do good?
A lie, a lie, what was a lie? It was so easy to say yes.
She saw Walter's eyes melt and his arms outstretched towards her.
She couldn't say it; she didn't know why, she just couldn't.
All she had gone through during these bitter weeks, Charlie and his unkindness, the cholera and all these people dying, the nuns, oddly enough even that funny, drunken little Waddington, it all seemed to have changed her so that she did not know herself; though she was so deeply moved, some bystander in her soul seemed to watch her with terror and surprise.
She had to tell the truth.
It did not seem worth while to lie.
Her thoughts wandered strangely: on a sudden she saw that dead beggar at the foot of the compound wall.
Why should she think of him?
She did not sob, the tears streamed down her face, quite easily, from wide eyes.
At last she answered the question.
He had asked her if he was the child's father.
"I don't know," she said.
He gave the ghost of a chuckle. It made Kitty shudder.
"It's a bit awkward, isn't it?"
His answer was characteristic, it was exactly what she would have expected him to say, but it made her heart sink.
She wondered it he realized how hard it had been for her to tell the truth (at the same moment she recognized that it had not been in the least hard, but inevitable) and if he gave her credit for it.
Her answer, / don't know, I don't know, hammered away in her head.
It was impossible now to take it back.
She got her handkerchief from her bag and dried her eyes.
They did not speak.
There was a siphon on the table by her bed and he got her a glass of water.
He brought it to her and held the glass while she drank. She noticed how thin his hand was, it was a fine hand, slender, with long fingers, but now it was nothing but skin and bone; it trembled a little; he could control his face, but his hand betrayed him.
"Don't mind my crying," she said. "It's nothing really; it's only that I can't help the water running out of my eyes."
She drank the water and he put the glass back. He sat down on a chair and lit a cigarette.
He gave a little sigh.
Once or twice before she had heard him sigh like that and it always gave her a catch at the heart.
Looking at him now, for he was staring with abstracted gaze out of the window, she was surprised that she had not noticed before how terribly thin he had grown during the last weeks.
His temples were sunken and the bones of his face showed through the skin.
His clothes hung on him loosely as though they had been made for a larger man.
Through his sunburn his face had a greenish pallor.
He looked exhausted.
He was working too hard, sleeping little, and eating nothing.
In her own grief and perturbation she found room to pity him.
It was cruel to think that she could do nothing for him.
He put his hand over his forehead, as though his head were aching, and she had a feeling that in his brain too those words hammered madly: I don't know, I don't know.
It was strange that this moody, cold, and shy man should have such a natural affection for very little babies; most men didn't care much even for their own, but the nuns, touched and a little amused, had more than once spoken of it.
If he felt like that about those funny little Chinese babies what would he have felt about his own?
Kitty bit her lips in order to prevent herself from crying again.
He looked at his watch.
"I'm afraid I must go back to the city.
I have a great deal to do to-day… Shall you be all right?"