“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

There was another long silence, then she got up.  She stood a moment, very still, made a little movement with her hand, and said:  “My darling boy, my most darling boy, don’t think of me—­think of yourself,” and, passing round the foot of the bed, went back into her room.

Jon turned—­curled into a sort of ball, as might a hedgehog—­into the corner made by the two walls.

He must have been twenty minutes there before a cry roused him.  It came from the terrace below.  He got up, scared.  Again came the cry:  “Jon!” His mother was calling!  He ran out and down the stairs, through the empty dining-room into the study.  She was kneeling before the old armchair, and his father was lying back quite white, his head on his breast, one of his hands resting on an open book, with a pencil clutched in it—­more strangely still than anything he had ever seen.  She looked round wildly, and said: 

“Oh!  Jon—­he’s dead—­he’s dead!”

Jon flung himself down, and reaching over the arm of the chair, where he had lately been sitting, put his lips to the forehead.  Icy cold!  How could—­how could Dad be dead, when only an hour ago—!  His mother’s arms were round the knees; pressing her breast against them.  “Why—­why wasn’t I with him?” he heard her whisper.  Then he saw the tottering word “Irene” pencilled on the open page, and broke down himself.  It was his first sight of human death, and its unutterable stillness blotted from him all other emotion; all else, then, was but preliminary to this!  All love and life, and joy, anxiety, and sorrow, all movement, light and beauty, but a beginning to this terrible white stillness.  It made a dreadful mark on him; all seemed suddenly little, futile, short.  He mastered himself at last, got up, and raised her.

“Mother! don’t cry—­Mother!”

Some hours later, when all was done that had to be, and his mother was lying down, he saw his father alone, on the bed, covered with a white sheet.  He stood for a long time gazing at that face which had never looked angry—­always whimsical, and kind.  “To be kind and keep your end up—­there’s nothing else in it,” he had once heard his father say.  How wonderfully Dad had acted up to that philosophy!  He understood now that his father had known for a long time past that this would come suddenly—­known, and not said a word.  He gazed with an awed and passionate reverence.  The loneliness of it—­just to spare his mother and himself!  His own trouble seemed small while he was looking at that face.  The word scribbled on the page!  The farewell word!  Now his mother had no one but himself!  He went up close to the dead face—­not changed at all, and yet completely changed.  He had heard his father say once that he did not believe in consciousness surviving death, or that if it did it might be just survival till the natural age limit of the body had