Instantly the taut stare slackened, her puckered lids fell, and she
dozed. Tears ran down Ellen's face, because her mother was paying no
attention to her during the last few moments they were ever to be
together, and was spending them in talk she could not understand with
Richard, whom she had thought loved her too well to play this trick upon
her. She could have cried aloud at her mother's unkind way of dying. It
struck her that there had always been a vein of selfishness and
inconsiderateness running through her mother's character, which had come
to a climax when she indulged in this preposterous death just when the
stage was set for their complete happiness. She had almost succeeded in
fleeing from her grief into an aggrieved feeling, when those poor loose
wrinkled lids lifted again, and the fluttering knowledge in those great
glazed eyes probed the room for her and leapt up when it found her.

There was a jerk of the head and a whisper, "I'm going!" It was, though
attenuated by the frailty of the dying body, the exact movement, the
exact gesture that she had used when, on her husband's death, she had
greeted the news that she and her daughter had been left with seventy
pounds a year. Just like she had said, "Well, we must just economise!"
She was going to be just as brave about death as she had been about
life, and this, considering the guarantees Time had given her concerning
the nature of Eternity, was a high kind of faith. "Mother dear! Mother
dear!" Ellen cried, and though she remembered that outside the door they
had told her she must not, she kissed her mother on the lips. "Mother
dear! ... it's been so ... enjoyable being with you!" Mrs. Melville made
a pleased noise, and by a weary nod of the head made it understood that
she would prefer not to speak again; but her hand, which was in Ellen's,
patted it.

All through the night that followed they pressed each other's hands, and
spoke. "Are you dead?" Ellen's quickened breath would ask; and the faint
pressure would answer, "No. I have still a little life, and I am using
it all to think of you, my darling." And sometimes that faint pressure
would ask, "Are you thinking of me, Ellen? These last few moments I want
all of you," and Ellen's fingers would say passionately, "I am all
yours, mother." In these moments the forgotten wisdom of the body, freed
from the tyranny of the mind and its continual running hither and
thither at the call of speculation, told them