The mother had taken the visitors’ room to sleep in ever since the day two months ago when Death had [12] ]walked whitely into that larger room and frozen with his strange breath the father of her youngest child.
The moon touched sadly now the face that lay in the smaller room, in that strangest of places wandered to by mortals—perfect dreamlessness.
Brown waves of hair strayed on the pillow, brown eyelashes lay motionless on cheeks where the lifeless tinge of grief knew itself for stranger, and was slowly giving way once more to the healthy life-colour that loved to dwell there. The contour of the face was at once grave and childish; an irresponsible flower-life of happiness would have accentuated certain lines about the nostrils and mouth into a look of spirited wilfulness, but the hard climbing of hills had been given to her instead, and the mouth at eight-and-twenty was wholesomely self-reliant.
Her youngest child, Weenie, was curled up beside her, a dark-haired morsel of four.
Across the landing, but rather lower down, was a third bedroom with a very tossed bed, where two little light-haired girls lay, their arms flung across each other, their curls tangled in the same heap.
From under the pillow of each peeped a book, but there were restrictions against reading in bed at night, and in the morning at eight and ten years old one is always so ready to get up that the volumes were merely put there for company. Against the wall stood a row of four dolls’ beds crowded with occupants, and, a little apart, a fifth one, quite empty.
[13]
]The book of the younger girl, Dorothy, slipped from the pillow and made a hard ridge for her neck to lie on. She turned restlessly for a minute or two, and tossed her head about, but the hardness did not move, and she woke drowsily. Her slumber had been uneasy, like her sister’s, most of the night, and the waking instantly brought a dull sense of a certain trouble in life. By the time she had blinked twice, recollection had come and she sat up, gently disengaging herself from the thin little arm across her chest, and gazed, all her heart in her eyes, at the empty miniature bed a moonbeam faintly discovered.
Then her gaze went to the windows, where the blinds were always left high up, that none of the sun’s first merry darts might be lost.
“Oh,” she said with a sudden gasp, horror in her eyes, “Phyl, Phyl, wake up at once.” She shook her hastily. Phyl’s face had almost a spiritual look in this faint light, so thin it was, so drained of colour the cheeks and lips.
“Whatever’s the matter?” she said, the impatience of a spoiled dreamland upon her.