It would be seven weeks, at the least, before Owen could come back. Her letter would take three weeks to reach him, and he would have to make arrangements. She wondered whether the Kiddy could hold out so long.
All night she was tormented by this fear, of the Kiddy's not holding out, of her just missing it; of every week being one more nail hammered, as she had once said, into the Kiddy's little coffin; and it was with a poignant premonition that she received a message from Addy Ranger in the morning. Miss Ranger was down-stairs; she had something to say to Miss Lempriere; she must see her. She couldn't come up; she hadn't a minute.
Addy stood outside on the doorstep. She was always in a violent hurry when on her way to Fleet Street, the scene for the time being of her job. But this morning her face showed signs of a profounder agitation. She made a rush at Nina.
"Oh, Miss Lempriere, will you go to Laura?"
"Is she ill?"
"No. He is. He's dying. He's in a fit. I think it's killing her."
The blinds were down when Nina reached the house in Camden Town.
The fit—it was apoplexy, Mrs. Baxter informed her—had not been long. It had come on, mercifully, in his sleep. Mercifully (Mrs. Baxter leant on it); but Miss Lempriere had better go up at once to Miss Gunning.
Nina went without a word.
The bed had been drawn into the middle of the small back room. The body of the old man lay on it, covered with a sheet. His head was tilted a little, showing the prone arch of the peaked nose; the jaw was bound with a handkerchief. Already the features were as they had been in the days before disease had touched them. Death had constrained them to their primal sanity. Death dominated them like a living soul.