As they passed under the arch into the hospital grounds she kept her arm in Richard’s because the warmth of his body made it seem impossible that the flesh could ever grow quite cold, and fixed her attention on the little clerk, because he offered a proof that the character of life was definitely comic.  But these frail assurances, that were but conceits made by the mind while it marked time before charging the dreaded truth, were overcome by the strangeness of this place.  The paved corridor that followed on and on was built with waist-high walls, and between the pillars that held up the gabled wooden roof the light streamed out on lawns of coarse grass pricking rain-gleaming sod; at intervals they passed the immense swing doors of the wards, glaringly bright with brass and highly polished gravy-coloured wood; at times another corridor ran into it, and at their meeting-place there blew a swift unnatural wind, private to this place and laden with the scentless scent of damp stone; down one such they saw a group of women walking, wrapped in cloaks of different colours, flushed and cheered from some night meal, making among themselves the infantile merriment that nuns and nurses know.

This was a city unlike any other.  It was set apart for the sick; and some sick people died; and of course there was no reason that people should not die merely because they were greatly beloved.  She sobbed; and the clerk, who was walking on ahead of them with the gait of one who carries a standard, turned round and, waving the key, which there could be no occasion for him to use, as all the doors were open, said kindly:  “You know you mustn’t be downhearted.  I’ve seen folk who came down on the verra same errand as yourselves go away in the morning with fine an’ happy faces.”  But after half a minute the intense intellectual honesty without which he could not have been so marked a character reasserted itself, and he turned again and added reluctantly, “But I’ve known more that didn’t.”  She laughed on to Richard’s shoulder and crammed the speeches greedily into her memory, that some night soon by the hearth in the sitting-room at Hume Park Square she might repeat them to her mother, whom she figured sitting in the armchair, looking remarkably well and wearing the moire blouse that she had given her for her birthday.

“She’s here,” said the clerk dramatically; and they stared at a door that looked like all the others.  It admitted them to a rectilinear place of white doors and distempered walls.  “She’s upstairs!” said the clerk, and they followed him.  But as he reached the top he bent double with a prodigiously respectful gesture, and cried to someone they could not see, “Good evening, sir, I’ve brought the friends of Ninety-three,” and turned and left them with some haste, impelled, Ellen thought, as she still amusedly centred her imagination upon him, by a fear of being rebuked for officiousness.  But as she came to the landing and saw the four people