would not be there. Richard, look at that
white dog!"

His arm slipped round her. "My little Ellen," he whispered, "Ellen!"

V

A turn of the long dark avenue brought them alongside the city of the
sick, which till then had been only a stain of light on the sky, and
they looked through the railings at the hospital blocks which lay spaced
over the level ground like battleships in a harbour. She reproached her
being as inadequate because no intuition told her in which block her
mother was. After a further stretch of avenue they came to a sandstone
arch with lit rooms on either side, which diffused a grudging brightness
through half-frosted Windows on some beds of laurel bushes and a gravel
drive. These things were so ugly in such a familiar way, so much of a
piece with the red suburban streets which she knew stretched from the
gates of this place through Morningside past Blackford Hill to
Newington, and which had always seemed to her to shelter only the
residue of life, strained of all events, that she took them as good
omens.

When they went into the room on the left, and found a little office with
ink-spattered walls and a clerk sitting on a high stool, she told
herself, while a quarter of her mind listened to Richard explaining
their errand and thought how nice it was to have a man to speak for one,
that it was impossible for such an ordinary place to be the setting of
an event so extraordinary, so unprecedented as death. It was true that
her father was dead, but it had happened when he was abroad, and so had
seemed just his last extreme indulgence of his habit of staying away
from home. But the clerk sprang to his feet and, thrusting his pen
behind his ear as if he were shouldering arms, said in a loud
consequential voice: "Ay, I sent a messenger along to your residence the
same time I 'phoned up to the Head Office to hev' the patient put on the
danger list! Everything possible is done in the way of consideration for
the feelings of friends and relations!" Yes, this was a hospital, and
of course people sometimes died in hospitals. But she pushed away that
fact and set her eyes steadily on the clerk's face, her mind on the
words he had just spoken, and nearly laughed aloud to see that here was
that happy and comic thing a Dogberry, a simple soul who gilds
employment in some mean and tedious capacity by conceiving it as a
position of power over great issues. He took a large key down from a
nail on the wall and e