'Well,' she laughed, 'wouldn't you like me to?'
'Oh, ay!' he admitted readily, 'I'st like it well enough. I don't know but what you aren't all on ye very good—you and th' wenches, and Fred as calls in of nights. But it's all one to me, I reckon. I take no pleasure i' life. Nay,' he went on, 'it isn't because of her. I've felt as I was done for for months past. I mun just drag on.'
'Don't talk like that, uncle.' She tried conventionally to cheer him. 'You must rouse yourself.'
'What for?'
She sought a good answer to this conundrum. 'For all of us,' she said lamely, at length.
'Leonora, my lass,' he remarked drily, 'you're no better than the rest of 'em.'
And as she sat there in the age-worn parlour, and thought of the distant days of his energy, when with his own hands he had pulled down a wall and replaced it by a glass partition, and of the night when he lay like a corpse on Ethel's bed at the mercy of his nephew, and of Aunt Hannah resting in the cold tomb just at the end of the street, her heart was filled for a moment with an awful, ineffable, devastating sadness. It seemed to her that every grief, anxiety, apprehension was joy itself compared to this supreme tragedy of natural decay.
'Shall I light the gas?' she suggested. The room was always obscure, and that evening happened to be a sombre one.
'Ay!'
'There!' she said brightly, when the gas flared, 'that's better, isn't it? Aren't you going to smoke?'