Yet she knew, and knew it feverishly, because night emptied of sleep is to the young a vacuum, in which their minds stagger about, that in a way the nurse was right.  If she had not been quite so clever she would never have made her mother cry, as she had done more than once by snapping at her when she had said stupid things.  There rushed on her the recollection of how she had once missed her mother from the fireside and had thought nothing of it, but on going upstairs to wash her hands, had found her sitting quite still on the wooden chair in her cold bedroom, with the tears rolling down her cheeks; and how, when Ellen had thrown her arms round her neck and begged her to say what was the matter, she had quavered, “You took me up so sharply when I thought Joseph Chamberlain was a Liberal.  And he was a Liberal once, dear, when your father and I were first married and he still talked to me.  I’m sure Joseph Chamberlain was a Liberal then.”  At this memory Ellen put her head down on the pillow beside her mother’s and sobbed bitterly; and was horrified to find herself being pleased because she was thus giving the nurse proof of proper feelings.

She sat up with a jerk.  She was not nearly nice enough to have been with her mother, who was so good that even now, when death was punishing her face like a brutal and victorious boxer, bringing out patches of pallor and inflamed redness, making the flesh fall away from the bone so that the features looked different from what they had been, it still did not look at all terrible, because the lines on it had been traced only by diffidence and generosity.  With her ash-grey hair, her wrinkles, and the mild unrecriminating expression with which she supported her pain, she looked like a good child caught up by old age in the obedient performance of some task.  That was what she had always been most like, all through life—­a good child.  She had always walked as if someone in authority, most likely an aunt, had just told her to mind and turn her toes out.  It had given her, when she grew older and her shoulders had become bent, a peculiar tripping gait which Ellen hated to remember she had often been ashamed of when they went into tea-shops or crossed a road in front of a lot of people, but which she saw now to have been lovelier than any dance, with its implication that all her errands were innocent.

“Mother, mother!” she moaned, and their hands pressed one another, and there was more intimate conversation between their flesh.  Her exalted feelings, as she came out of them, reminded her of other shared occasions of ecstasy.  She remembered Mrs. Melville clutching excitedly at her arm as she turned her face away from the west, where a tiny darkness of banked clouds had succeeded flames, round which little rounded golden cloudlets thronged like Cupids round a celestial bonfire, and crying in a tone of gourmandise, “I would go anywhere for a good sunset!”