arkably
well and wearing the moire blouse that she had given her for her
birthday.

"She's here," said the clerk dramatically; and they stared at a door
that looked like all the others. It admitted them to a rectilinear place
of white doors and distempered walls. "She's upstairs!" said the clerk,
and they followed him. But as he reached the top he bent double with a
prodigiously respectful gesture, and cried to someone they could not
see, "Good evening, sir, I've brought the friends of Ninety-three," and
turned and left them with some haste, impelled, Ellen thought, as she
still amusedly centred her imagination upon him, by a fear of being
rebuked for officiousness. But as she came to the landing and saw the
four people who were standing there, having evidently just come through
the door, which one of them was softly closing, everything left her mind
but the knowledge that mother was dying. They forced it on her by their
appearance alone, for they said nothing. They stood quite still, looking
at her and Richard as if in her red hair and his tall swarthiness they
saw something that, like the rainbow, laid on the eye a duty of devout
absorbent sight; and on them fell a stream of harsh electric light that
displayed their individual characters and the common quality that now
convinced her that mother was dying.

There were two men in white coats, one sprucely middled aged, whose
vitality was bubbling in him like a pot of soup--good soup made of meat
and bones, with none of the gristle of the spirit in it; the other tall
and fair and young, who turned a stethoscope in his long hands and
looked from the lines on his pale face to be a martyr to thought; there
was a grey-haired sister with large earnest spectacles and a ninepin
body; there was a young nurse whose bare forearm, as she drew the door
to, was not less destitute of signs of mental activity than her broad,
comely face. And it was plain from their air of indifference and
gravity, of uninterested yet strained attention, that they were newly
come from a scene which, though almost tediously familiar to them, yet
struck them as solemn. They were banishing their impression of it from
their consciousness, since they would not be able to carry on their work
if they began to be excited about such every-day events. They seemed to
be practising a deliberate stockishness as if they were urging the flesh
to resist its quickened pulses; but their solemnity had fled down to
that