The doctor listened a moment and, as if enchanted with the impression she had produced, Laura went back to the writing-table, and settling the folds of her brown silk widely over the floor, she began to write:
'"Ye gods, they fail, they falter,
Thy hand hath struck them down.
Their woof the Parcae alter,
Beware thy mother's frown!
What such as I in glory
Compared with such as thee?
Would, in the conflict gory,
That I had died for thee!"'
At this point the inspiration seemed to desert her, and raising her pen from the paper, she bit its end thoughtfully, seeking for a transitional phrase whereby she might be able to allude to the Light-god.
They were in a six-shilling-a-week bedroom in the neighbourhood of the Strand. The window looked on to a bit of red-tiled roofing, a cistern, and a clothes-line on which a petticoat flapped, and in a small iron bedstead, facing the light, Kate lay delirious, her stomach enormously distended by dropsy. From time to time she waved her arms, now wasted to mere bones. She had been insensible for three whole days, speaking in broken phrases of her past life—of Mrs. Ede, the potteries, the two little girls, Annie and Lizzie. Dick, she declared, had been very good to her. Ralph, too, had been kind, and she was determined that the two men should not quarrel over her. They must not kill each other; she would not allow it; they should be friends. They would all be friends yet; that is to say, if Mrs. Ede would permit of it; and why should she stand between people and make enemies of them? She fell back into stupor; and next day her ideas were still more confused. In the belief that it was for the part of the Baillie that Dick and Ralph were quarrelling she began to express her regret that there was nothing in the piece for her. Nor were memories of the baby girl who had died in Manchester lacking. She prayed Ralph to believe that the child was not his but Dick's child. She prayed and supplicated in Laura's arms till Laura laid her back on the pillow exhausted.
'Give me something to drink; I'm dying of thirst,' the sick woman murmured faintly.
Laura started from her reveries, and going over to the fireplace, where the beef-tea was standing, poured out half a cup; but, owing to great difficulty in breathing, it was some time before the patient could drink it.
After a long silence Kate said:
'I've been very ill, haven't I? I think I must be dying.'
'Death is not death,' Laura answered, 'when we die for Pan, the undying representative of the universe cognizable to the senses.'
Over Kate's mind lay a vague dream, through whose gloom two things were just perceptible—an idea of death and a desire to see Dick. But she was almost too weak to seek for words, and it was with great effort that she said: