‘If you wish it,’ he said, forced to yield.

And even then she could not be content.

‘You give me your word to do nothing at all until you hear from me?’

He paused, but he saw no alternative to submission.  ‘Yes.’

She thanked him, and without shaking hands or saying good-night she went upstairs and resumed her place by the bedside.  She could hear Uncle Meshach’s cab drive away.

‘How came Mr. Twemlow to be here, mother?’ Rose demanded quietly.

‘I don’t know,’ Leonora replied.  ‘He must have been at uncle’s.’

When the doctor had been again and gone, and various neighbours and the ‘Signal’ reporter had called to inquire for news, and the hour was growing late, Ethel said to her mother, ’Fred thinks he had better stay all night.’

‘But why?’ Leonora asked.

‘Well, mother,’ said Milly, ’it’s just as well to have a man in the house.’

‘He can rest on the Chesterfield in the drawing-room,’ Ethel added.  ‘Then if he’s wanted——­’

‘Yes, yes,’ Leonora agreed.  ‘And tell him he’s very kind.’

At midnight, Fred was reading in the drawing-room, the man in the house, the ultimate fount of security for seven women.  Bessie, having refused positively to go to bed, slept in a chair in the kitchen, her heels touching the scrap of hearthrug which lay like a little island on the red tiles in front of the range.  Rose and Millicent had retired to bed till three o’clock.  Ethel, as the eldest, stayed with her mother.  When the hall-clock sounded one, meaning half past twelve, Leonora glanced at her daughter, who reclined on the sofa at the foot of the beds; the girl had fallen into a doze.

John’s condition was unchanged; the doctor had said that he might possibly survive for many hours.  He lay on his back, with open eyes, and damp face and hair; his arms rested inert on the sheet; and underneath that thin covering his chest rose and fell from time to time, with a scarcely perceptible movement.  It seemed to Leonora that she could realise now what had happened and what was to happen.  In the nocturnal solemnity of the house filled with sleeping and quiescent youth, she who was so mature and so satiate had the sensation of being alone with her mate.  Images of Arthur Twemlow did not distract her.  With the full strength of her mind she had shut an iron door on the episode in the garden; it was as though it had never existed.  And she gazed at John with calm and sad compassion.  ‘I would not sell my home,’ she reflected, ‘and here is the consequence of refusal.’  She wished she had yielded—­and she could perceive how unimportant, comparatively, bricks-and-mortar might be—­but she did not blame herself for not having yielded.  She merely regretted her sensitive obstinacy as a misfortune for both of them.  She had a vision of humanity in a hurried procession, driven along by some force unseen and ruthless, a procession in which the grotesque and the pitiable were always occurring.  She thought of John standing over Meshach with the cold towel, and of Meshach passing the flame across John’s dying eyes, and these juxtapositions appeared to her intolerably mournful in their ridiculous grimness.