il some milk and make final
arrangements. The presence of this ample lady disturbed him. The gale
rattling the windows of the kitchen did not provide any feeling of
firelight snugness, but rather made his thoughts more restless, was even
so insistent as to carry them on its wings, weak, formless thoughts, to
the end of Hagworth Street, where the bar of the "Masonic Arms" spread a
wider and more cheerful illumination than was to be found in the harried
kitchen of Number Seventeen. So Charlie Raeburn went out to spend time
and money in piloting several friends across the shallows of Mr.
Gladstone's mind.

Upstairs Mrs. Raeburn, left alone, again contemplated the annoying
curtains; though by now they were scarcely visible against the gloom
outside. She dragged herself off the bed and, moving across to the
window, stood there, rubbing the muslin between her fingers. She
remained for a while thus, peering at the backs of the houses opposite
that, small though they really were, loomed with menace in the lonely
dusk. Shadows of women at work, always at work, went to and fro upon the
blinds. They were muffled sounds of children crying, the occasional
splash of emptied pails, and against the last glimmer of sunset the
smoke of chimneys blown furiously outwards. To complete the air of
sadness and desolation, the faded leaf of a dried-up geranium was
lisping against the window-pane. She gave up fingering the muslin
curtains and came back to the middle of the room, wondering vaguely when
the next bout of pain was due and why the "woman" didn't come upstairs
and make her comfortable. There were matches on the toilet-table; so she
lit a candle, whose light gave every piece of ugly furniture a shadow
and made the room ghostly and unfamiliar. Presently she held the light
beside her face and stared at herself in the glass, and thought how
pretty she still looked, and, flushed by the fever, how young.

She experienced a sensation of fading personality. She seemed actually
to be losing herself. Eyes, bright with excitement, glittered back from
the mirror, and suddenly there came upon her overwhelmingly the fear of
death.

And if she died, would anybody pity her, or would she lie forgotten
always after the momentary tribute of white chrysanthemums? Death,
death, she found herself saying over to the tune of a clock ticking in
the passage. But she had no desire to die. Christmas was near, with its
shoplit excursions and mistletoe and merr