An involuntary half-smile of astonishment parted May's lips when she saw the small tears gather in the dirty corners of her grandmother's eyes and slip along the flaccid shriveled cheeks and finally fall in gray spots of moisture on the cream-colored flannel in which the baby was wrapped.
Mrs. Farley felt that she should tell May something about her mother, but did not know how to begin. "Go to sleep. You'll wake Bobby. I'll show you the baby in the morning."
"It's morning already," May pointed out after a minute.
Mrs. Farley, moving away with averted face, glanced at the gray luminousness which stole under the shade and blanched the wainscot. "No matter if it is," she said. "It's not morning for you. Go to sleep."
Hesitating, May clung to the bedrail; but she slipped at last into the sheet. Soon after, in spite of her resistance, she had fallen asleep again, and lay, breathing deeply and evenly, with her lips parted in dreaming interest.
Laurence went out of the death chamber into the hall, where the gray light of the cold spring morning came dimly from the street through the transom. A milk cart stopped outside. He could hear the clatter of tins, as it came to a halt, and the hurrying feet of the driver running down the area steps and up again. Bottles were jostled together with a dull clink. The man outside whistled. The horse's shoes chimed on the cold hard street, and the milk wagon rumbled away, the noises blurring in distance.
There were more footsteps, dull, methodic. One man called to another. There was a musical shiver of breaking glass, curses uttered in a hoarse male voice, and the flat thud of running feet.
Laurence opened the front door and looked into the street. Above the dull housetops were stone blue clouds. The arc light burning over the pavement opposite was like a ball of pale unraveling silk. On the windows of the houses with their lowered blinds, the sunless day was reflected in livid brightness.
He could not bear the light and he turned back into the house into the darkened parlor, where the leaves of plants on the stand in the corner seemed to burn with a bluish fire. He could see the begonia leaves like pink hairy flesh, and the gray fur of fern fronds.