anxious and fearful

"Thank you," she said, equally stilted. It was only when she was seated and he could gaze down upon her whole person that he noticed how visibly swollen her feet and ankles were. "Meggie! Have you flown all the way through from Australia without breaking your journey? What's the matter?" "Yes, I did fly straight through," she said. "For the past twenty-nine hours I've been sitting in planes between Gilly and Rome, with nothing to do except stare out the window at the clouds, and think." Her voice was harsh, cold. "What's the matter?" he repeated impatiently, anxious and fearful. She lifted her gaze from her feet and looked at him steadily. There was something awful in her eyes; something so dark and chilling that the skin on the back of his neck crawled and automatically he put his hand up to stroke it. "Dane is dead," said Meggie. His hand slipped, flopped like a rag doll's into his scarlet lap as he sank into a chair. "Dead?" he asked slowly. "Dane dead?" "Yes. He was drowned six days ago in Crete, rescuing some women from the sea." He leaned forward, put his hands over his face. "Dead?" she heard him say indistinctly. "Dane dead? My beautiful boy! He can't be dead! Dane-he was the perfect priest-all that I couldn't be. What I lacked he had." His voice broke. "He always had it-that was what we all recognized-all of us who aren't perfect priests. Dead? Oh, dear Lord!" "Don't bother about your dear Lord, Ralph," said the stranger sitting opposite him. "You have more important things to do. I came to ask for your help-not to witness your grief. I've had all those hours in the air to go over the way I'd tell you this, all those hours just staring out the window at the clouds knowing Dane is dead. After that, your grief has no power to move me." Yet when he lifted his face from his hands her dead cold heart bounded, twisted, leaped. It was Dane's face, with a suffering written upon it that Dane would never live to feel. Oh, thank God! Thank God he's dead, can never now go through what this man has, what I have. Better he's dead than to suffer something like this.