A faint, slanting gleam of evening light had fallen in through the empty square of window.  Her father generally sat at the table just inside; he always kept the same place.  And she went up and peered in between the flower-pots,—­some half-stifled, dirty geraniums and hydrangeas, saturated with public-house effluvia.

Who was that—­that man who was lying on the dirty counter, with his necktie and shirt unfastened and one arm hanging down—­was it her father?

“If only some one had a lancet!—­he moved just now—­a lancet!”

What more they said on the steps she did not notice, except that some wanted to deny her entrance, and others again said that she was Holman’s daughter.

She awoke, as if after a fall from a great height during which she had lost consciousness, to find herself sitting by the counter supporting her father’s head.  She thought she remembered clinging to his neck and begging him to answer her:  but there was no rattling in his throat now.

They had placed an old, worn sofa-pillow and the seat of a chair under his head.  Behind stood quart and pint measures, dram-glasses, tin funnels and beer-bottles pushed right up to the wall to make room.  His wide-open eyes stared up at the once white-washed beams of the ceiling, and one side of his face was drawn up into a grin, which made him look as if he were unspeakably disgusted with the dirty ceiling.

A big man sat at the door.  Silla knew him:  he was the public-house bear, as he was called; he who turned people out for Mrs. Selvig.  He was sitting silent on the bench.

There was perfect stillness in the room; she heard only the drip from the tap of the brandy-cask down into the dish beneath, and saw, through the half-open door to the inner room, Mrs. Selvig and her two daughters bustling about on tiptoe.

A young man in spectacles entered.  He asked a few rapid questions, while he opened a case of instruments on the counter at the feet of the prostrate figure.  He listened at its chest with the stethoscope and without it, and shook his head, pulled out a lancet, and pushed the shirt sleeve up the hanging arm.

“Hold the sleeve, so that it doesn’t slip down!” he said with a glance up at Silla; he took her to be a member of the household.

The lancet pierced and pierced again.  The ashen grey face of the girl looked into his, as if she would beg him for only one drop of that which was the life.

There came out something like a thick, dark syrup.

He listened again, felt again; one more trial with the lancet, and it was with an air of superiority, and a mouth drawn up like his professor’s, that the young bachelor of medicine turned to those assembled and pronounced his concise verdict: 

“Stone dead!  The man’s stone dead!—­from drink!”

His words were followed by a cry from Silla, who threw herself upon her father.

“Is that his daughter?” asked the young doctor.  He carefully wiped his lancet at the light, and put his instruments together preparatory to going, but gazed at the same time over his spectacles at her.  Heedless of everything, she cried incessantly over the body.