t all seemed unreal, he could not understand it.

At night he often worked in her room, looking up from time to time. And
so often he found her blue eyes fixed on him. And when their eyes met,
she smiled. He worked away again mechanically, producing good stuff
without knowing what he was doing.

Sometimes he came in, very pale and still, with watchful, sudden eyes,
like a man who is drunk almost to death. They were both afraid of the
veils that were ripping between them.

Then she pretended to be better, chattered to him gaily, made a great
fuss over some scraps of news. For they had both come to the condition
when they had to make much of the trifles, lest they should give in to
the big thing, and their human independence would go smash. They were
afraid, so they made light of things and were gay.

Sometimes as she lay he knew she was thinking of the past. Her mouth
gradually shut hard in a line. She was holding herself rigid, so that
she might die without ever uttering the great cry that was tearing from
her. He never forgot that hard, utterly lonely and stubborn clenching
of her mouth, which persisted for weeks. Sometimes, when it was lighter,
she talked about her husband. Now she hated him. She did not forgive
him. She could not bear him to be in the room. And a few things, the
things that had been most bitter to her, came up again so strongly that
they broke from her, and she told her son.

He felt as if his life were being destroyed, piece by piece, within him.
Often the tears came suddenly. He ran to the station, the tear-drops
falling on the pavement. Often he could not go on with his work. The
pen stopped writing. He sat staring, quite unconscious. And when he came
round again he felt sick, and trembled in his limbs. He never questioned
what it was. His mind did not try to analyse or understand. He merely
submitted, and kept his eyes shut; let the thing go over him.

His mother did the same. She thought of the pain, of the morphia, of the
next day; hardly ever of the death. That was coming, she knew. She had
to submit to it. But she would never entreat it or make friends with
it. Blind, with her face shut hard and blind, she was pushed towards the
door. The days passed, the weeks, the months.

Sometimes, in the sunny afternoons, she seemed almost happy.

"I try to think of the nice times--when we went to Mablethorpe, and
Robin Hood's Bay, and Shanklin," she said. "After all, not everybody has
seen those