damp air filled the room. The rain had begun again,
descending with a soft, purring sound. Above it she heard the laboured
breathing from the hearth rug, and in the firelight she saw the regular
inflation of the swollen cheeks. The distended pupils stared back at
her, void of light.

As she stood motionless, her hands clenched before her, she followed the
soft, weighty tread of Miss Chris, passing to and fro with improvised
applications. The light fall of the rain irritated her; she longed for
the relentless downpour of the night.

At the end of an hour the roll of wheels broke the stillness, and she
went out to meet the doctor, passing, with a shiver, the unconscious
mass on the floor.

They carried him to his bed in the chamber next the parlour, and through
the night and day he lay an inert bulk beneath the bedclothes. Miss
Chris and Eugenia and the servants passed in and out of his room. One of
the dogs came and sat upon the threshold until Eugenia put her arms
about his neck and drew him away. She had not wept; she was white and
drawn and silent, as if the shock had dulled her to insensibility.
During the afternoon of the next day she persuaded Miss Chris to rest,
and, softly closing the door, sat down in a chair beside her father's
bed. It was the high white bed that had known the marriage, birth, and
death of a century of Battles. In it her father was born; beside it,
kneeling at prayer, her mother had died. The stately tester frame had
seen generations come and go, and had remained unchanged. Now its stiff
white curtains made a ghastly drapery above the purple face.

Eugenia sat motionless, her thoughts vaguely circling about the still
figure before her. It was not her father--this she felt profoundly--it
was some strange shape that had taken his place, or she was held by some
farcical nightmare from which she should awake presently with a start.
The half-used glasses on the little table beside her; the candle burned
down in the socket, and overlooked; the tightly corked phials of useless
drugs; the strong odour of mustard from the saucer in which a plaster
had been mixed--these things struck upon her faltering consciousness
with a shock of horrible reality. The odour of the mustard was more real
than the breathing of the body on the bed.

As she sat there, she thought of her mother--the pale, still woman who
had lain beautiful and dead where her father was dying now. She came to
her as from a faded miniatu