Richard made some slight exclamation, and she rolled those vast eyes towards him, and fixed him with what might have been an accusing stare.  At first he covered his mouth with his hand and looked at her under his lids as if the accusation were just, and then he remembered it was not, and squared his shoulders, and went to the other side of the bed and knelt down.  Her eyes followed him implacably, but there he met them.  He said, “Truly ...  I am all right.  I will look after her.  She can’t be poor, whatever happens.  Trust me, mother, she’ll be all right,” and under the bedclothes he found her hand, and raised it to his lips.  Instantly the taut stare slackened, her puckered lids fell, and she dozed.  Tears ran down Ellen’s face, because her mother was paying no attention to her during the last few moments they were ever to be together, and was spending them in talk she could not understand with Richard, whom she had thought loved her too well to play this trick upon her.  She could have cried aloud at her mother’s unkind way of dying.  It struck her that there had always been a vein of selfishness and inconsiderateness running through her mother’s character, which had come to a climax when she indulged in this preposterous death just when the stage was set for their complete happiness.  She had almost succeeded in fleeing from her grief into an aggrieved feeling, when those poor loose wrinkled lids lifted again, and the fluttering knowledge in those great glazed eyes probed the room for her and leapt up when it found her.

There was a jerk of the head and a whisper, “I’m going!” It was, though attenuated by the frailty of the dying body, the exact movement, the exact gesture that she had used when, on her husband’s death, she had greeted the news that she and her daughter had been left with seventy pounds a year.  Just like she had said, “Well, we must just economise!” She was going to be just as brave about death as she had been about life, and this, considering the guarantees Time had given her concerning the nature of Eternity, was a high kind of faith.  “Mother dear!  Mother dear!” Ellen cried, and though she remembered that outside the door they had told her she must not, she kissed her mother on the lips.  “Mother dear! ... it’s been so ... enjoyable being with you!” Mrs. Melville made a pleased noise, and by a weary nod of the head made it understood that she would prefer not to speak again; but her hand, which was in Ellen’s, patted it.

All through the night that followed they pressed each other’s hands, and spoke.  “Are you dead?” Ellen’s quickened breath would ask; and the faint pressure would answer, “No.  I have still a little life, and I am using it all to think of you, my darling.”  And sometimes that faint pressure would ask, “Are you thinking of me, Ellen?  These last few moments I want all of you,” and Ellen’s fingers would say passionately, “I am all yours, mother.”  In these moments the forgotten wisdom of the body,