A strangled grin caused considerable pain to Jack's beautiful face.
"I suppose he didn't rightly appreciate my sort of looks," he said.
"The jealous brute," said Mary. "But I hope he'll pay for it. I hope he will. I do hope he hasn't really disfigured you," she ended on a note of agitation.
"No, no! Besides that doesn't matter all the world."
"It matters all the world," she cried, with strange fierceness, "to me."
[CHAPTER XII]
THE GREAT PASSING
I
Jack soon got better. Soon he was sitting in the old armchair by the parlour fire. There was a little fire, against the damp. This was Gran's place. But Gran did not leave her bed.
He had been in to see her, and she frightened him. The grey, dusky skin round the sunken mouth and sharpened nose, the eyes that were mostly shut, and never really open, the harsh breathing, the hands lying like old translucent stone on the bed-cover: it frightened him, and gave him a horror of dissolution and decay. He wanted terribly to be out again with the healthy Tom, among the horses. But not yet—he must wait yet awhile. So he took his turn sitting by Gran, to relieve Mary, who got little rest. And he became nervous, fanciful, frightened as he had never been before in his life. The family seemed to abandon him as they abandoned Gran. The cold isolation and horror of death.