She sat listening without changing her position, with a dimness of confusion and amaze coming over her clear gaze. The intimation was so bewildering, so astounding, that her faculties failed to grasp it. Then she said, “To leave them--my children? To be separated from my children?” with a shrill tone of inquiry, rising into a sort of breathless cry. John Trevanion took his hands from his face, and looked at her with a look which brought more certainty than words. The old lawyer clasped his hands upon the papers before him, without lifting his eyes, and mournfully nodded again and again his gray head. But she waited for an answer. She could not let herself believe it. “It is not _that_? My head is going round. I don’t understand the meaning of words. It is not _that_?” And then she rose up suddenly to her feet, clasping her hands together, and cried out, “My God!” The men rose too, as with one impulse; and John Trevanion called out loudly to the doctor, who hurried to her. She put them away with a motion of her hands. “The doctor? What can the doctor do for me?” she cried, with the scorn of despair. “Go, go, go! I need no support.” The men had come close to her on either side, with that confused idea that the victim must faint or fall, or sustain some physical convulsion, which men naturally entertain in respect to a woman. She made a motion, as if to keep them away, with her arms, and stood there in the midst, her pale face, with the white surroundings of her distinctive dress, clearly defined against the other dusk and troubled countenances. They thought the moments of suspense endless, but to her they were imperceptible. Not all the wisest counsellors in the world could have helped her in that effort of desperation which her lonely soul was making to understand. There was so much that no one knew but herself. Her mind went through all the details of a history unthought of. She had to put together and follow the thread of events, and gather up a hundred indications which now came all flashing about her like marsh-lights, leading her swift thoughts here and there, through the hitherto undivined workings of her husband’s mind, and ripening of fate. Thus it was that she came slowly to perceive what it meant, and all that it meant, which nature, even when perceiving the sense of the words, had refused to believe. When she spoke they all started with a sort of panic and individual alarm, as if something might be coming which would be too terrible to listen to. But what she said had a strange composure, which was a relief, yet almost a horror, to them. “Will you tell me,” she asked, “exactly what it is, again?”