At last they reached the room, which she recognised. There were the same flowered chintzes, there was her portrait on the table.
A sound of voices came from an adjoining apartment, and the woman stopped to listen, raising her finger with a gesture commanding silence.
Suddenly a voice rang out, clear and peremptory. "Please ask Miss Harford to come here. Where is Goody? She will understand."
Then she ran forward, her hand on Philippa's arm, through the connecting door into the inner room. A strong pungent smell of restoratives filled the air. The figure on the bed was sitting upright, motioning to one side the nurse and an elderly man, presumably the doctor, who were trying in vain to soothe him. The next moment his strength failed—he fell backward on the pillows, and his face assumed a livid death-like hue.
"Too late! too late!" murmured Mrs. Goodman in a tone of anguish.
The doctor, who had been occupied in his attentions on the invalid, glanced up and met Philippa's eyes. He recoiled as if in surprise or horror, but in an instant his professional calm reasserted itself.
No sound broke the stillness of the room except the laboured breathing of the poor old woman. Philippa gazed at the still white face, perfectly still, perfectly white, and apparently lifeless. The nurse raised herself with a sigh which seemed to intimate that all further effort was useless.
The slow minutes passed, and with each moment a greyer shadow crept like a veil over the face of the dying man.
Suddenly Mrs. Goodman spoke, sharply, and in a voice that sounded strident in the silence.
"Speak to him! call him!" she said.