reath. "Oh, dear!" It was her turn to put a
hand on him, for she was afraid of death.

"Can't believe it," he said again, and taking her with him, he went as
though he were drawn, towards the lighted windows and looked in.

"Yes," he said, assuring himself that this thing really was.

Fascinated by the steadfastness of his gaze, Miriam looked too and drew
back with a muffled cry. She had seen the old man rigid on a red velvet
sofa, his head on a yellow cushion, his grey hair in some way coarsened
by the state of death, his limbs clad in the garments of every day and
strangely insulted by them. Near him, with her back to the window and
straight and stiff as a sentinel, sat Mrs. Biggs, the housekeeper, the
knob of her smooth black hair defying destiny.

Still whispering, Miriam begged, "George, don't look any more." Her
horror was as much for the immobile woman as for the dead man. "Come
away, before she turns round. I want to go home. George--I'm sorry."

"Yes," he said.

"Good-night."

"Good-night," he answered, and she saw him look through the window
again.

Going across the moor, she cried feebly. She wished old Halkett had not
been lying on the red sofa. He should have died in the big kitchen of
his fathers, or upstairs in a great bed, not in that commonly-furnished
little sitting-room where the work-basket of Mrs. Biggs kept company
with a cheap china lamp and photographs in frames. She wondered how they
would manage to undress him, and for how long Mrs. Biggs would sit
beside him like a fate, a fate in a red blouse and a brown skirt.
Perhaps even now they were pulling off his clothes. Terrible for George
to have to do that, she thought, yet it seemed natural enough work for
Mrs. Biggs, with her hard mouth and cold eyes, and no doubt she had
often put him to bed in the lusty days of his carousals. Perhaps the
dead could really see from under their stiff eyelids, and old Halkett
would laugh at the difficulty with which they disrobed him for this last
time. Perhaps he had been watching when George and she looked through
the window. Until now she had never seen him when he did not leer at
her, and she felt that he must still be leering under the mask of death.

The taint of what she had looked on hung heavily about her, and the
fresh air of the moor could not clear it away. Crying still, in little
whimpers which consoled her, she stole through the garden and the house
to the beautiful solitude of Phoebe's roo