There was nothing else. Nothing wrong with Daddy—only indigestion. He had had it before.
The room was still dark, but the leaded squares of the window lattices barred a sky pale with dawn. In her room across the passage Anne would be sitting up with Nicky. He remembered now that he had to get up early to make her some tea.
He lit a candle and went to her door to see if she were still awake. Her voice answered his gentle tapping, "Who's there?"
"Me. Jerrold. May I come in?"
"Yes. But don't bring the light in. He's sleeping."
He put out the candle and made his way to her. Against the window panes he could see the outline of her body sitting upright in a chair. She glimmered there in her white wrapper and he made out something black stretched straight and still in her lap. He sat down in the window-seat and watched.
The room was mysterious, full of dusk air that thinned as the dawn stirred in it palpably, waking first Anne's white bed, a strip of white cornice and a sheet of watery looking-glass. Nicky's saucer of milk gleamed white on the dark floor at Anne's feet. The pale ceiling lightened; and with a sliding shimmer of polished curves the furniture rose up from the walls. Presently it stood clear, wine-coloured, shining in the strange, pure light.
And in the strange, pure light he saw Anne, in her white wrapper with the great rope of her black hair, plaited, hanging down her back. The little black cat lay in her white lap, supported by her arm.
She smiled at Jerrold strangely. She spoke and her voice was low and strange.
"He's asleep, Jerry. He kept on looking at me and mewing. Then he tried to climb into my lap and couldn't. And I took him up and he was quiet then. I think he was pleased that I took him … I've given him the morphia pill and I don't think he's in pain. He'll die in his sleep."