Finally there was the bed where his mother lay.  The coverlet of blue silk upon it he knew was somehow familiar to him, and after fitful gropings in his mind to establish the association, he remembered that it had been on the bed in her room in Curzon Street, and supposed that it had been brought here with others of her personal belongings.  A little core of light, focused on one of the brass balls at the head of the bed, caught his eye, and he saw that the sun, beginning to decline, came in under the Venetian blind.  The nurse, sitting in the window, noticed this also, and lowered it.  The thought of Sylvia crossed his brain for a moment; then he thought of his father; but every train of reflection dissolved almost as soon as it was formed, and he came back again and again to his mother’s face.

It was perfectly peaceful and strangely young-looking, as if the cool, soothing hand of death, which presently would quiet all trouble for her, had been already at work there erasing the marks that the years had graven upon it.  And yet it was not so much young as ageless; it seemed to have passed beyond the register and limitations of time.  Sometimes for a moment it was like the face of a stranger, and then suddenly it would become beloved and familiar again.  It was just so she had looked when she came so timidly into his room one night at Ashbridge, asking him if it would be troublesome to him if she sat and talked with him for a little.  The mouth was a little parted for her slow, even breathing; the corners of it smiled; and yet he was not sure if they smiled.  It was hard to tell, for she lay there quite flat, without pillows, and he looked at her from an unusual angle.  Sometimes he felt as if he had been sitting there watching for uncounted years; and then again the hours that he had been here appeared to have lasted but for a moment, as if he had but looked once at her.

As the day declined the breeze of evening awoke, rattling the blind.  By now the sun had swung farther west, and the nurse pulled the blind up.  Outside in the bushes in the garden the call of birds to each other had begun, and a thrush came close to the window and sang a liquid phrase, and then repeated it.  Michael glanced there and saw the bird, speckle-breasted, with throat that throbbed with the notes; and then, looking back to the bed, he saw that his mother’s eyes were open.

She looked vaguely about the room for a moment, as if she had awoke from some deep sleep and found herself in an unfamiliar place.  Then, turning her head slightly, she saw him, and there was no longer any question as to whether her mouth smiled, for all her face was flooded with deep, serene joy.

He bent towards her and her lips parted.

“Michael, my dear,” she said gently.

Michael heard the rustle of the nurse’s dress as she got up and came to the bedside.  He slipped from his chair on to his knees, so that his face was near his mother’s.  He felt in his heart that the moment he had so longed for was to be granted him, that she had come back to him, not only as he had known her during the weeks that they had lived alone together, when his presence made her so content, but in a manner infinitely more real and more embracing.