“Poor man!”

“You will be there,” said Lady Valleys dryly.

Barbara drew back into her corner.

“Don’t tease me, Mother!”

An expression of compunction crossed Lady Valleys’ face; she tried to possess herself of Barbara’s hand.  But that languid hand did not return her squeeze.

“I know the mood you’re in, dear.  It wants all one’s pluck to shake it off; don’t let it grow on you.  You’d better go down to Uncle Dennis to-morrow.  You’ve been overdoing it.”

Barbara sighed.

“I wish it were to-morrow.”

The car had stopped, and Lady Valleys said: 

“Will you come in, or are you too tired?  It always does them good to see you.”

“You’re twice as tired as me,” Barbara answered; “of course I’ll come.”

At the entrance of the two ladies, there rose at once a faint buzz and murmur.  Lady Valleys, whose ample presence radiated suddenly a businesslike and cheery confidence, went to a bedside and sat down.  But Barbara stood in a thin streak of the July sunlight, uncertain where to begin, amongst the faces turned towards her.  The poor dears looked so humble, and so wistful, and so tired.  There was one lying quite flat, who had not even raised her head to see who had come in.  That slumbering, pale, high cheek-boned face had a frailty as if a touch, a breath, would shatter it; a wisp of the blackest hair, finer than silk, lay across the forehead; the closed eyes were deep sunk; one hand, scarred almost to the bone with work, rested above her breast.  She breathed between lips which had no colour.  About her, sleeping, was a kind of beauty.  And there came over the girl a queer rush of emotion.  The sleeper seemed so apart from everything there, from all the formality and stiffness of the ward.  To look at her swept away the languid, hollow feeling with which she had come in; it made her think of the tors at home, when the wind was blowing, and all was bare, and grand, and sometimes terrible.  There was something elemental in that still sleep.  And the old lady in the next led, with a brown wrinkled face and bright black eyes brimful of life, seemed almost vulgar beside such remote tranquillity, while she was telling Barbara that a little bunch of heather in the better half of a soap-dish on the window-sill had come from Wales, because, as she explained:  “My mother was born in Stirling, dearie; so I likes a bit of heather, though I never been out o’ Bethnal Green meself.”

But when Barbara again passed, the sleeping woman was sitting up, and looked but a poor ordinary thing—­her strange fragile beauty all withdrawn.

It was a relief when Lady Valleys said: 

“My dear, my Naval Bazaar at five-thirty; and while I’m there you must go home and have a rest, and freshen yourself up for the evening.  We dine at Plassey House.”