She gasped. Her face went red, then gray, as if it had caught fire before my eyes and collapsed in an avalanche of ashes. She pulled a lace handkerchief from her sleeve, knotted it, and jammed it into her mouth, and for a few moments, she sat there, rocking in her chair, gripping the lace between her teeth like an eighteenth-century seaman having his leg amputated below the knee. At last, she looked up at me with brimming eyes and said in a shaky voice, “Mr. Twining was my mother’s brother.”
That seems a little overwrought for three decades after the fact...
