You think it make her sad? It is not for that I
give it you. It is to give you pleasure too."

He was labouring under an almost physical distress. She was poking fun
at him, at herself, at death. She was making him a partner of thieves
and loose women. And yet:

"It must not make you sad at all. When you see it you laugh--just as
you laugh when I dance because I dance so ver' bad. Look 'ere, I 'ave
something that you give me too." She dived back into the box and
brought out a shilling lying side by side with the pearl in the palm of
her open hand. "You tell 'er--that was all poor Gyp was worth to you,
Monsieur Robert."

He had taken it. She tried to laugh out loud, triumphantly, the famous
laugh. And then grey agony had her by the throat. She turned her face
from him to the wall.

He felt that the old woman had risen. She was moving towards them. He
said quietly:

"At least I can relieve you."

She made a passionate, absolute gesture of refusal. An astonished
nurse had entered. He gave brief instructions. He said good-night,
not looking at the limp, quiet figure on the bed, and went out.

He knew that he had seemed competent, unhurried and unmoved as befitted
a man to whom death was the most salient feature of life.

But he knew also that he had fled from her.

In the crowd that went with him that night were Francey Wilmot and
Connie Edwards and Cosgrave and all the people who had made up his
youth. There were little old women who were Christines, and even James
Stonehouse was there, tragically and hopefully in search of something
that he had never found. Any moment he might turn his face towards his
son, and it would not be hideous, only perplexed and pitiful.

It was as though an ugly, monstrous mass had been smashed to fragments
whose facets shone with extraordinary, undreamed-of colours.

Not only the bodies of the people drifted with him, but their lives
touched his on every side. It became a sort of secret pressure. They
were neither great nor beautiful. They were identical with the people
he had always seen on the streets and in the hospitals, sickly or
grossly commonplace, but he could no longer judge them as from a great
distance. He was down in the thick of them. They concerned him--or he
had no other concern. He was part of their strangely wandering
procession. He looked into their separate faces and thought: "This man
says 'I' to himself. And one day he will say: 'I