“So you’ve come back,” she said.  “You might go in and tell me how he is.”

“Haven’t you seen him?”

“Of course I’ve seen him.  But I’m afraid, Jerrold.  It was awful, awful, the haemorrhage.  You can’t think how awful.  I daren’t go in and see it again.  I shouldn’t be a bit of good if I did.  I should only faint, or be ill or something.  I simply can not bear it.”

“You mustn’t go in,” he said.

“Who’s with him?”

“Eliot and Anne.”

“Anne?”

“Yes.”

“Jerrold, to think that Anne should be with him and me not.”

“Well, she’ll be all right.  She can stand things.”

“It’s all very well for Anne.  He isn’t her husband.”

“You’d better go away, Mother.”

“Not before you tell me how he is.  Go in, Jerrold.”

He knocked and went in.

His father was sitting up in his white, slender bed, raised on Eliot’s arm.  He saw his face, strained and smoothed with exhaustion, sallow white against the pillows, the back-drawn-mouth, the sharp, peaked nose, the iron grey hair, pointed with sweat, sticking to the forehead.  A face of piteous, tired patience, waiting.  He saw Eliot’s face, close, close beside it by the edge of the pillow, grave and sombre and intent.

Anne was crossing the room from the bed to the washstand.  Her face was very white but she had an air of great competence and composure.  She carried a white basin brimming with a reddish froth.  He saw little red specks splashed on the sleeve of her white linen gown.  He shuddered.

Eliot made a sign to him and he went back to the door where his mother waited.

“Is he better?” she whispered.  “Can I come in?”

Jerrold shook his head.  “Better not—­yet.”

“You’ll send for me if—­if—­”

“Yes.”

He heard her trailing away along the gallery.  He went into the room.  He stood at the foot of the bed and stared, stared at his father lying there in Eliot’s arms.  He would have liked to have been in Eliot’s place, close to him, close, holding him.  As it was he could do nothing but stand and look at him with that helpless, agonized stare.  He had to look at him, to look and look, punishing himself with sight for not having seen.

His eyes felt hot and brittle; they kept on filling with tears, burned themselves dry and filled again.  His hand clutched the edge of the footrail as if only so he could keep his stand there.

A stream of warm air came through the open windows.  Everything in the room stood still in it, unnaturally still, waiting.  He was aware of the pattern of the window curtains.  Blue parrots perched on brown branches among red flowers on a white ground; it all hung very straight and still, waiting.

Anne looked at him and spoke.  She was standing beside the bed now, holding the clean basin and a towel, ready.

“Jerrold, you might go and get some more ice.  It’s in the bucket in the bath-room.  Break it up into little pieces, like that.  You split it with a needle.”