In the eyes bent on her across the table tears sprang up. "Are you so ill, Greta?"
The woman made no answer. She was listening again. It seemed to be the silence that spoke to her, not voices.
"That's one of the things I thought of," the girl went on. "I might get them to let me bring a doctor."
"It would be a great doctor who should cure my ill!"
The words were despairing enough and spoken faintly, but that touch of the old theatricalism was so much more natural than the hoarse, uncadenced speech alternating with the insane listening to nothing at all, that Nan took heart. "May I say you are ill? May I try—"
Greta shook her head.
"What's the use? I've always known I shouldn't live long. We don't."
For a moment Nan couldn't speak. As to Greta, whatever she had come through, whatever she was going toward, she hadn't got beyond enjoyment of tearing at another's heart-strings on the way.
"You mustn't say, mustn't think, you aren't going to live! You must remember—" Nan longed and didn't dare to quote the precedent of the old father in the Berlin brewery, still watchman of the night, as Singleton had told her. She was the more glad she hadn't ventured to speak of him when she presently found that Greta's "we" linked her to no blood kin. She had sunk down farther in the chair, a huddle of coarse serge and misery, and her hands slipped off her lap and hung at her sides.
"The strain is too great," she said under her breath, speaking the truth at last.