At last the father died. And the night he died Mary staggered across to the wretched cottage of a couple of old-age pensioners opposite. 'I must rest a bit,' she said, and sitting down in a chair by the fire she fainted. Influenza had been on her for some days, and now pneumonia had set in. The old people would not hear of her being taken back to her deserted cottage. They gave up their own room to her; they did everything for her their feeble strength allowed. But the fierce disease beat down her small remaining strength. Elizabeth, since the story came to her knowledge, had done her best to help. But it was too late.
She went now to kneel at the beside of the dying woman. Mary's weary eyes lifted, and she smiled faintly at the lady who had been kind to her. Then unconsciousness returned, and the village nurse gave it as her opinion that the end was near.
Elizabeth looked round the room. Thank God the cottage did not belong to the Squire! The bedroom was about ten feet by seven, with a sloping thatched roof, supported by beams three centuries old. The one window was about two feet square. The nurse pointed to it.
'The doctor said no pneumonia case could possibly recover in a room like this. And there are dozens of them, Miss, in this village. Oh, Mary is glad to go. She nursed her mother for years, and then her father for years. She never had a day's pleasure, and she was as good as gold.'
Elizabeth held the clammy, misshapen hand, pressing her lips to it when she rose to go, as to the garment of a saint.
Then she walked quickly back through the fading spring day, her heart torn with prayer and remorse—remorse that such a life as Mary Wilson's should have been possible within reach of her own life and she not know it; and passionate praying for a better world, through and after the long anguish of the war.
'Else for what will these boys have given their lives!—what meaning in the suffering and the agony!—or in the world which permits and begets them?'
Then, at last, it was past seven o'clock. The dusk had fallen, and the stars were coming out in a pure pale blue, over the leafless trees. Elizabeth and Alice Gaddesden stood waiting at the open door of the hall. A motor ambulance was meeting the train. They would soon be here now.
Elizabeth turned to Mrs. Gaddesden.
'Won't you give a last look and see if it is all right?'