What tragic news does Patrick give Mary at the beginning of the short story? How do you think this impacts her emotionally? How does she react?

Notice Patrick reiterates almost apologetically that it's 'kind of a bad time to be telling' Mary whatever he has just told her. Here, he is referring to giving Mary bad news while she is pregnant with their unborn child.

Explanation:

Patrick implies in the story that he is leaving Mary and that he will make sure that she will be well taken care of. She reacted to his news with shock as she didn't expect the news since she had just made him comfortable at home. This impacts her emotionally as her husband is suddenly saying that he is going to leave her but she doesn't know why he's going to leave her. Mary doesn't know if and what she has done wrong to make Patrick want to suddenly leave her and this might bring shock, sadness, and anger to her.

quite an interesting way to teach topic sentences, because the answer to this question is the best definition of a topic sentence that one can present, it is as if answering the questions taught you how to do it, this is some real teaching, it is terribly well-done.

the topic sentence in this paragraph is:

topic sentences writers stay on track and keep a paragraph from becoming an aimless collection of sentences about an idea.

which incidentally tells you what a topic sentence should be.

from the count of monte cristo there are two synonyms of the word “grotto”. these words are chamber and cavern.