That flattened little form under the crumpled coverlet was Phoebe’s, was the same body with which she had given him so much delight.  This was the Phoebe who had hung about his neck in the valley and smothered his words upon his lips with kisses—­she who had taught him her own knowledge of love, that instinctive knowledge of Aspasia and her sisters; it was through her he had become a man.  So he felt now looking at her.

With dawn, the day after the child’s birth, it became plain that she could hold the frail thread of her life no longer.  The nurse sat on one side of the bed; the doctor had not yet come back after leaving to attend another case.  The child lay beside her, because the only time she spoke or showed any interest that night she had asked for it.  Now she lay either asleep or already unconscious, her hair all pushed away from her face, which had fallen into hollows.  She looked far older than her years—­older than it would have been possible to imagine she ever could look.

Ishmael sat very still, his mind as quiescent as his body; it was as though it had been hypnotised by its steady concentration on her approaching death as by the steady keeping of the eyes fixed on some one glittering object.  All around that one point thought had ceased; impalpable walls shut off from consciousness everything else in the scheme of things.  The focussing in the quiet room sharpened, grew more intense; the liquid light of dawn began to flood the air, and a bright shaft shot across the hill as the sun swam up over the rim of the moor.  It fell across the bed, and Phoebe stirred and opened her eyes.  Their gaze rested blankly on Ishmael, wandered round the room, then fell to the round head against her shoulder.

The shaft of sun lay upon the baby’s reddish fair fluff of hair, and the brightness of it seemed to arrest Phoebe’s look, as it might have the unreasoning gaze of a child.  She put out one wavering hand and tried to touch it; her direction was uncertain, and the hand fell again without reaching more than the outskirts of the beam.  Thinking she wished to touch the child, the nurse guided her hand, and as Phoebe felt her fingers fall about the curve of its head a faint look of content passed across her face.  Then she tried to make as though to lift her hand, but it fell sideways.  The nurse moved the baby nearer her, but it was not that that Phoebe wanted; she kept trying to touch the gleam of sun upon the white quilt.  Ishmael felt a pang go through him as he remembered the girl who had once before tried to pick the sun....

A few moments later the child, as though stirred by some prescience, began to whimper and make little struggling movements—­Phoebe had died as simply as she had lived, and as secretively.

CHAPTER IV

THE DISCOVERING OF NICKY