r with misted eyes, as if he found it touching that anyone
should feel like that, and this reassured her. Perhaps he knew an answer
to this problem. It might be possible that he knew it and yet could not
tell it, for she had never been able to tell him how she loved him,
though she knew quite well. She lifted her face to his that she might
see if there were knowledge in his eyes, and was disappointed that he
merely bent to kiss her.

"No!" she said fretfully, adding half honestly, half because he had
disappointed her. "You mustn't. I've been kissing mother."

But he persisted; and they exchanged a solemn kiss, the religious sister
of their usual passionate kisses. Then she shook with a sudden access of
anger, and clung to his coat lapels and stared into his eyes so that he
should give her full attention, and poured out her tale of wrong in a
spate of whispering. "Every night ever since I can remember I've seen
mother kneeling by her bed to say her prayers, no matter how cold it
was, though she never would buy herself good woollens, and never
scamping them to less than five minutes. And what has she got for it?
What has she got for it?" But they called for her behind the screen,
and she dropped her hands and answered, pretending that her mother was
so well that it might have been she who called, "I'm coming, darling."

The moustached doctor, when she had come to the foot of the bed, said
gently, "I'm sorry; it's all over."

She bent a careful scrutiny on her mother. "Are you sure?" she said
wistfully.

"Quite sure."

"May I kiss her?"

"Please don't. It isn't safe."

"Ah well!" she sighed. "Then we'd best be going. Richard, are you
ready?"

As he came to her side she raised her head and breathed "Good night!" to
that ghostly essence which she conceived was floating vaporously in the
upper air and slipped her arm in his. "Good night, and thank you for all
you've done for her," she said to the people round the bed. As she went
to the door a remembrance checked her. "What of the funeral?"

"They'll tell you all that down at the office." This was a terrifying
place, where there existed a routine to meet this strange contingency of
death; where one stepped from a room where drawn blinds cabined in
electric light into a passage full with pale daylight; and left a
beloved in that untimely artificial brightness as in some separate and
dangerous division of time; where mother lay dead.

Yet after all, because terror