le
but never quite criminal failings into an existence just as decently and
minimally furnished as this room.

Her daughter clenched her fists with anger at it. But hearing a sound of
stertorous breathing, she tiptoed across the room and looked behind the
screen. There Mrs. Melville was lying on her back in a narrow iron
bedstead. Her head was turned away, so that nothing of it could be seen
but a thin grey plait trailing across the pillow, but her body seemed to
have shrunk, and hardly raised the bedclothes. Ellen went to the side of
the bed and knelt so that she might look into the hidden face, and was
for a second terrified to find herself caught in the wide beam of two
glaring open eyes that seemed much larger than her mother's had ever
been. All that dear face was changed. The skin was glazed and pink, and
about the gaping mouth, out of which they had taken the false teeth,
there was a wandering blueness which seemed to come and go with the
slow, roaring breath. Ellen fell back in a sitting posture and looked
for Richard, whom she had forgotten, and who was now standing at the end
of the bed. She stretched out her hands to him and moaned; and at that
sound recognition stirred in the centre of Mrs. Melville's immense
glazed gaze, like a small waking bird ruffling its feathers on some
inmost branch of a large tree.

"Oh, mother dear! Mother dear!"

From that roaring throat came a tortured, happy noise; and she tried to
make her lips meet, and speak.

"My wee lamb, don't try to speak. Just lie quiet. It's heaven just to be
with you. You needn't speak."

But Mrs. Melville fought to say it. Something had struck her as so
remarkable that she was willing to spend one of her last breaths
commenting on it. They both bent forward eagerly to hear it. She
whispered: "Nice to have a room of one's own."

Richard made some slight exclamation, and she rolled those vast eyes
towards him, and fixed him with what might have been an accusing stare.
At first he covered his mouth with his hand and looked at her under his
lids as if the accusation were just, and then he remembered it was not,
and squared his shoulders, and went to the other side of the bed and
knelt down. Her eyes followed him implacably, but there he met them. He
said, "Truly ... I am all right. I will look after her. She can't be
poor, whatever happens. Trust me, mother, she'll be all right," and
under the bedclothes he found her hand, and raised it to his lips.