The news seemed to strike a chill to Mavis’ heart.  Owing to their frequent meetings, Miss Nippett had become endeared to her:  she could hardly speak for emotion.

“How long will it be?” she asked.

“She’ll probably drag through the night.  But if I were you, I should go home in the morning.”

“And leave her to die alone?”

“You have your own trouble to face.  Hasn’t she any friends?”

“None that I know of.”

“No one she’d care to see?”

“There’s one man, her old employer.  But he’s always so busy.”

“Where does he live?”

Mavis told him.

“I’ll find time to see him and ask him to come.”

“It’s very kind of you.”

But the kindly doctor did not seem to hear what she said; he was sadly regarding Miss Nippett, who, just now, was dozing uneasily on her pillows.  Then, without saying a word, he left the room.

Thus it came about that Mavis kept the long, sad night vigil beside the woman whom death was to claim so soon.  As Miss Nippett’s numbered moments remorselessly passed, the girl’s heart went out to the pitiful, shrivelled figure in the bed.  It seemed that an unfair contest was being fought between the might and majesty of death on the one hand, and an insignificant, work-worn woman on the other, in which the ailing body had not the ghost of a chance.  Mavis found herself reflecting on the futility of life, if all it led to were such a pitifully unequal struggle as that going on before her eyes.  Then she remembered how she had been taught that this world was but a preparation for the joyous life in the next; also, that directly Miss Nippett ceased to breathe it would mean that she was entering upon her existence in realms of bliss.  Somehow, Mavis could not help smiling at the mental picture of her friend which had suddenly occurred to her.  In this, she had imagined Miss Nippett with a crown on her head and a harp in her hand, singing celestial melodies at the top of her voice.  The next moment, she reproached herself for this untimely thought; her heart ached at the extremity of the little old woman huddled up in the bed.  Mavis had always lived her life among more or less healthy people, who were ceaselessly struggling in order to live; consequently, she had always disregarded the existence of death.  The great destroyer seemed to find small employment amongst those who flocked to their work in the morning and left it at night; but here, in the meagre room, where human clay was, as it were, stripped of all adornments, in order not to lose the smallest chance in the fell tussle with disease, it was brought home to Mavis what frail opposition the bodies of men and women alike offer to the assaults of the many missioners of death.  Things that she had not thought of before were laid bare before her eyes.  The inevitable ending of life bestowed on all flesh an infinite pathos which she had never before remarked.  The impotence of mankind to