were beyond her
practical reach. She always had to explain to Dan, to Ishmael never. She
slipped her arm through his now and gave it a little hug.

"Don't worry! After all something must come to all of us," she said.

The phrase knocked at Ishmael's heart. "Something must come to all of
us...." Everyone had to die of something, from some outrage on nature.
There had to be some convulsion out of the ordinary course to bring it
about; cases where the human machine simply ran down, as with the
Parson, were rare. This horror was lying in wait for all--the manner of
their leaving. It was astonishing, looked at in cold blood, that people
lived and were gay and happy with this hanging over them from their
birth onwards. He realised that it was this fact--that only by some
disruption of the ordinary course could death come--which had always
made death seem so unnatural to him. He had for a flash the feeling that
every woman, however maternal, has when she knows she is to have a
baby--a feeling of being caught in something that will not let one go.
"Something must come to all of us...."

Her "something" had come to Vassie. She had to submit to the operation,
but, though she rallied from it, no real good could be done, and the end
became merely a question of time. She did not kick against the pricks,
as Ishmael had done all his life; she accepted it all with a certain
stoicism that was not without its grandeur, and, though she became very
irritable, she had moments of greater softening than ever before. She
was dying when the clouds of the coming war with the South African
Republics first began to lower over the country. The Flynns were in
London, for Vassie was now too ill ever to think of crossing over to
Ireland again, but she suddenly took it into her head to wish to be
taken down to Cloom. This was when she heard the news that Nicky, who
had been a volunteer for some time, had enlisted in the Duke of
Cornwall's Light Infantry. She had always been very attached to him,
spending upon him what of thwarted motherhood she alone knew, and he for
his part had responded to her rather more than he did to most people.
Ishmael was wired to, and in November of '99, a month after the
declaration of war, Dan brought her down with a couple of hospital
nurses and she was installed in the biggest and sunniest room at Cloom.

With Nicky's absorption into the Army and Vassie's incursion hard upon
the edge of her final parting Ishmael was m