Ishmael sat very still, his mind as quiescent as his body; it was as
though it had been hypnotised by its steady concentration on her
approaching death as by the steady keeping of the eyes fixed on some one
glittering object. All around that one point thought had ceased;
impalpable walls shut off from consciousness everything else in the
scheme of things. The focussing in the quiet room sharpened, grew more
intense; the liquid light of dawn began to flood the air, and a bright
shaft shot across the hill as the sun swam up over the rim of the moor.
It fell across the bed, and Phoebe stirred and opened her eyes. Their
gaze rested blankly on Ishmael, wandered round the room, then fell to
the round head against her shoulder.

The shaft of sun lay upon the baby's reddish fair fluff of hair, and the
brightness of it seemed to arrest Phoebe's look, as it might have the
unreasoning gaze of a child. She put out one wavering hand and tried to
touch it; her direction was uncertain, and the hand fell again without
reaching more than the outskirts of the beam. Thinking she wished to
touch the child, the nurse guided her hand, and as Phoebe felt her
fingers fall about the curve of its head a faint look of content passed
across her face. Then she tried to make as though to lift her hand, but
it fell sideways. The nurse moved the baby nearer her, but it was not
that that Phoebe wanted; she kept trying to touch the gleam of sun
upon the white quilt. Ishmael felt a pang go through him as he
remembered the girl who had once before tried to pick the sun....

A few moments later the child, as though stirred by some prescience,
began to whimper and make little struggling movements--Phoebe had died
as simply as she had lived, and as secretively.

CHAPTER IV

THE DISCOVERING OF NICKY

There followed for Ishmael a time when the sordidness inseparable from a
death in a civilised country made of everything a hideousness, and he
was aware of a rising tide of irritability in himself that he found it
difficult to keep within the decorous bounds of the subdued aspect
required from a newly-made widower. Later, after the funeral was over
and life at the Manor had somewhat settled down again, with the
incongruous addition of a nurse, he began to feel that unkind touch of
the ludicrous which accompanies the position of a young man left with a
baby on his hands. He was ashamed of this feeling and tried to suppress
it, but it was there nevert