“Is this it?”

“Yes, you must look, my eyes ache,” she said peevishly.  “Besides, her number will not be there.  Richard, did ever you see a white dog like yon in the gutter.  Is it not a most peculiar-looking animal?”

After a moment’s silence he said steadily, “What did you say your mother’s number was?”

“Ninety-three.  I told you it would not be there.  Richard, look at that white dog!”

His arm slipped round her.  “My little Ellen,” he whispered, “Ellen!”

V

A turn of the long dark avenue brought them alongside the city of the sick, which till then had been only a stain of light on the sky, and they looked through the railings at the hospital blocks which lay spaced over the level ground like battleships in a harbour.  She reproached her being as inadequate because no intuition told her in which block her mother was.  After a further stretch of avenue they came to a sandstone arch with lit rooms on either side, which diffused a grudging brightness through half-frosted Windows on some beds of laurel bushes and a gravel drive.  These things were so ugly in such a familiar way, so much of a piece with the red suburban streets which she knew stretched from the gates of this place through Morningside past Blackford Hill to Newington, and which had always seemed to her to shelter only the residue of life, strained of all events, that she took them as good omens.

When they went into the room on the left, and found a little office with ink-spattered walls and a clerk sitting on a high stool, she told herself, while a quarter of her mind listened to Richard explaining their errand and thought how nice it was to have a man to speak for one, that it was impossible for such an ordinary place to be the setting of an event so extraordinary, so unprecedented as death.  It was true that her father was dead, but it had happened when he was abroad, and so had seemed just his last extreme indulgence of his habit of staying away from home.  But the clerk sprang to his feet and, thrusting his pen behind his ear as if he were shouldering arms, said in a loud consequential voice:  “Ay, I sent a messenger along to your residence the same time I ‘phoned up to the Head Office to hev’ the patient put on the danger list!  Everything possible is done in the way of consideration for the feelings of friends and relations!” Yes, this was a hospital, and of course people sometimes died in hospitals.  But she pushed away that fact and set her eyes steadily on the clerk’s face, her mind on the words he had just spoken, and nearly laughed aloud to see that here was that happy and comic thing a Dogberry, a simple soul who gilds employment in some mean and tedious capacity by conceiving it as a position of power over great issues.  He took a large key down from a nail on the wall and exclaimed, “I’ll take you myself!” and she perceived that he was going to do something which he should have delegated to a porter, so that he might continue to display himself and his office to these two strangers.