“No!” she said fretfully, adding half honestly, half because he had disappointed her.  “You mustn’t.  I’ve been kissing mother.”

But he persisted; and they exchanged a solemn kiss, the religious sister of their usual passionate kisses.  Then she shook with a sudden access of anger, and clung to his coat lapels and stared into his eyes so that he should give her full attention, and poured out her tale of wrong in a spate of whispering.  “Every night ever since I can remember I’ve seen mother kneeling by her bed to say her prayers, no matter how cold it was, though she never would buy herself good woollens, and never scamping them to less than five minutes.  And what has she got for it?  What has she got for it?” But they called for her behind the screen, and she dropped her hands and answered, pretending that her mother was so well that it might have been she who called, “I’m coming, darling.”

The moustached doctor, when she had come to the foot of the bed, said gently, “I’m sorry; it’s all over.”

She bent a careful scrutiny on her mother.  “Are you sure?” she said wistfully.

“Quite sure.”

“May I kiss her?”

“Please don’t.  It isn’t safe.”

“Ah well!” she sighed.  “Then we’d best be going.  Richard, are you ready?”

As he came to her side she raised her head and breathed “Good night!” to that ghostly essence which she conceived was floating vaporously in the upper air and slipped her arm in his.  “Good night, and thank you for all you’ve done for her,” she said to the people round the bed.  As she went to the door a remembrance checked her.  “What of the funeral?”

“They’ll tell you all that down at the office.”  This was a terrifying place, where there existed a routine to meet this strange contingency of death; where one stepped from a room where drawn blinds cabined in electric light into a passage full with pale daylight; and left a beloved in that untimely artificial brightness as in some separate and dangerous division of time; where mother lay dead.

Yet after all, because terror existed here and had written itself across the night as intensely as beauty ever wrote itself across the sky in sunset, it need not be that terror is one of the forces which dictate the plot of the universe.  This was a catchment area that drained the whole city of terror; and how small it was!  Certainly terror was among the moods of the creative Person, whom for the sake of clear thinking they found it necessary to hold responsible for life, though being children of this age, and conscious of humanity’s grievance, they thought of Him without love.  But it was one of the least frequent and the most impermanent of His moods.  All the people one does not know seem to be quite happy.  Therefore it might be that though Fate had finally closed the story of Mrs. Melville’s life, and had to the end shown her no mercy, there was no occasion for despair about the future.  It might well be that no other life would ever be so grievous.  Therefore it was with not the least selfish taint of sorrow, it was with tears that were provoked only by the vanishment of their beloved, that they passed out through the iron gates.