She said no more that night.  She looked into the bedroom for a few minutes, and saw the old woman asleep.  Her old hand lay out on the coverlet, and still between the fingers was twisted the silly string of beads.  Mabel went softly across in the shaded light, and tried to detach it; but the wrinkled fingers writhed and closed, and a murmur came from the half-open lips.  Ah! how piteous it was, thought the girl, how hopeless that a soul should flow out into such darkness, unwilling to make the supreme, generous surrender, and lay down its life because life itself demanded it!

Then she went to her own room.

* * * * *

The clocks were chiming three, and the grey dawn lay on the walls, when she awoke to find by her bed the woman who had sat with the old lady.

“Come at once, madam; Mrs. Brand is dying.”

IV

Oliver was with them by six o’clock; he came straight up into his mother’s room to find that all was over.

The room was full of the morning light and the clean air, and a bubble of bird-music poured in from the lawn.  But his wife knelt by the bed, still holding the wrinkled hands of the old woman, her face buried in her arms.  The face of his mother was quieter than he had ever seen it, the lines showed only like the faintest shadows on an alabaster mask; her lips were set in a smile.  He looked for a moment, waiting until the spasm that caught his throat had died again.  Then he put his hand on his wife’s shoulder.

“When?” he said.

Mabel lifted her face.

“Oh!  Oliver,” she murmured.  “It was an hour ago. ...  Look at this.”

She released the dead hands and showed the rosary still twisted there; it had snapped in the last struggle, and a brown bead lay beneath the fingers.

“I did what I could,” sobbed Mabel.  “I was not hard with her.  But she would not listen.  She kept on crying out for the priest as long as she could speak.”

“My dear ... " began the man.  Then he, too, went down on his knees by his wife, leaned forward and kissed the rosary, while tears blinded him.

“Yes, yes,” he said.  “Leave her in peace.  I would not move it for the world:  it was her toy, was it not?”

The girl stared at him, astonished.

“We can be generous, too,” he said.  “We have all the world at last.  And she—­she has lost nothing:  it was too late.”

“I did what I could.”

“Yes, my darling, and you were right.  But she was too old; she could not understand.”

He paused.

“Euthanasia?” he whispered with something very like tenderness.

She nodded.

“Yes,” she said; “just as the last agony began.  She resisted, but I knew you would wish it.”

They talked together for an hour in the garden before Oliver went to his room; and he began to tell her presently of all that had passed.