“I didn’t want to make a fuss,” he explained.

“Where is it?” she demanded, on the edge of the bed now, ready to rise.

“I’ll show it to you in the morning, mother.  Lie down and go to sleep.  I’ve been awake long enough.”

“Where is it?” she repeated, and he heard her moving across the room toward the gas fixture.

“In my vest pocket.  It’s a box of pills.  You can’t tell nothin’ about it.”

She lit the gas and went to his waistcoat, hanging where it always hung at night—­on a hook beside the closet door.  He watched her fumble through the pockets, watched her take her spectacles from the corner of the mantel and put them on, the bridge well down toward the end of her nose.  A not at all romantic figure she made, standing beside the sputtering gas jet, her spectacles balanced on her nose, her thin neck and forearms exposed, and her old face studying the lid of the pill box held in her toil- and age-worn hands.  The box dropped from her fingers and rolled along the floor.  He saw an awful look slowly creep over her features as the terrible thought crept over her mind.  As she began to turn her face toward him, with a motion of the head like that of a machine on unoiled bearings, he closed his eyes; but he felt her looking at him.

“Dr. Schulze!” she said, an almost soundless breathing of the name that always meant the last resort in mortal illness.

He was trying to think of lies to tell her, but he could think of nothing.  The sense of light upon his eyelids ceased.  He presently felt her slowly getting into bed.  A pall-like silence; then upon his cheek, in long discontinued caress, a hand whose touch was as light and soft as the fall of a rose leaf—­the hand of love that toil and age cannot make harsh, and her fingers were wet with her tears.  Thus they lay in the darkness and silence, facing together the tragedy of the eternal separation.

“What did he say, dearest?” she asked.  She had not used that word to him since the first baby came and they began to call each other “father” and “mother.”  All these years the children had been between them, and each had held the other important chiefly as related to them.  Now it was as in their youth—­just he and she, so close that only death could come between them.

“It’s a long way off,” said Hiram.  He would not set ringing in her ears that knell which was clanging to him its solemn, incessant, menacing “Put your house in order!”

“Tell me what he said,” she urged gently.

“He couldn’t make out exactly.  The medicine’ll patch me up.”

She did not insist—­why fret him to confess what she knew the instant she read “Schulze” on the box?  After an hour she heard him breathing as only a sleeper can breathe; but she watched on until morning.  When they were dressing, each looked at the other furtively from time to time, a great tenderness in his eyes, and in hers the anguish of a dread that might not be spoken.