so transparent,
so exhausted; the least little twitching of just-opened lips showed that
she breathed. A tiny sigh escaped; her eyelids fluttered. The son,
leaning forward, said:

"Sweetheart, we're here."

The eyes opened then; something more than a simple human spirit seemed
to look through--it gazed for a long, long minute; then the lips parted.
They bent to catch the sound.

"My darlings--don't cry; smile!" And the eyes closed again. On her face
a smile so touching that it rent the heart flickered and went out.
Breath had ceased to pass the faded lips.

In the long silence the French girl's helpless sobbing rose; the parrot
stirred uneasily in his still-covered cage. And the son and daughter
knelt, pressing their faces hard against the couch.

II

DEFEAT

She had been standing there on the pavement a quarter of an hour or so
after her shilling's worth of concert. Women of her profession are not
supposed to have redeeming points, especially when--like May Belinski,
as she now preferred to dub herself--they are German; but this woman
certainly had music in her soul. She often gave herself these "music
baths" when the Promenade Concerts were on, and had just spent half her
total wealth in listening to some Mozart and a Beethoven symphony.

She was feeling almost elated, full of divine sound, and of the
wonderful summer moonlight which was filling the whole dark town. Women
"of a certain type" have, at all events, emotions--and what a comfort
that is, even to themselves! To stand just there had become rather a
habit of hers. One could seem to be waiting for somebody coming out of
the concert, not yet over--which, of course, was precisely what she
_was_ doing. One need not forever be stealthily glancing and perpetually
moving on in that peculiar way, which, while it satisfied the police
and Mrs. Grundy, must not quite deceive others as to her business in
life. She had only "been at it" long enough to have acquired a nervous
dread of almost everything--not long enough to have passed through that
dread to callousness. Some women take so much longer than others. And
even for a woman "of a certain type" her position was exceptionally
nerve-racking in war-time, going as she did by a false name. Indeed, in
all England there could hardly be a greater pariah than was this German
woman of the night.

She idled outside a book-shop humming a little, pretending to read the
titles of the books by moonlight, taking