"There are some folks sleeping yet."
And because he had put off the worry that had been harping at him he found the work coming true and easy. He forgot the book and his big dreams, half way happy if he could earn enough to prevent his being an added burden to Augusta. And because he now did not greatly care, because he left the whole business on the knees of whatever gods had cared to meddle with his affairs, the work began to pay well.
Three separate eddies of life moved quietly about their round in the house. Ann the cook had taken the reins of authority from Augusta's hands and was now ruling the boarding house with a competent and jealous care. The boarders did not like her, but they knew that she was honest and remorselessly fair and that there was no appeal from her judgments. There were no complaints and the outward business of the house went on smoothly and decorously as always. In the two rooms that were now the world of Augusta and her mother everything circled about the dim little pale flame of life in her mother which Augusta was feeding with her love. And in his own room Wardwell worked craftily on, going softly, husbanding his strength from day to day, paying it out painfully, like a miser bit by bit, at the machine, making every bit count for some work done, and jealously guarding his growing weakness from Augusta's eyes. She must know before very long, he realized. But, well, who could tell what might happen? And in the meantime there was a little work to be done each day. Each line of it would be a help to her in the end.
So the three eddies of life went quietly around, touching each other and lapping a little upon each other, but each one a world by itself. Spring came and slipped well along into May, the street cries changed, the glistening pavements began to throw the heat back up into the house, and the threat of a blistering summer came upon the air. The three little worlds in the house went on so quietly, so unobtrusively, that it seemed that they might have been forgotten, that they might go on indefinitely, that they had been left out of any scheme of change.
But the change came, swift and disturbing as though it had never been expected.
Wardwell heard the cry come up in the still night from the room below him. He had been sitting in the dark, thinking of nothing, his mind at loose ends, but he knew Augusta's cry and recognized in it the trembling, very human fear of death.
As he came to the door of Rose Wilding's room he saw Augusta half kneeling on the bed holding fast to her mother's hands. To Wardwell it seemed that Rose Wilding was making a quivering, feeble struggle to rise. But Augusta evidently knew different. She was pleading in a desperate, pitiful whisper:
"Don't go! Please, darling mamma, don't go till you've known me, just for one little minute! I wont try to keep you, darling, I know you want to go. But just look at me once, so that I can see that you know your own Augusta, please darling."
The hands that Augusta held stopped their quivering struggle and Rose Wilding lay quiet, as though listening. Then slowly, naturally, she opened her eyes with the sweet clear light of perfect reason shining gently in them. And she said in a tender, confiding whisper:
"Augusta, my own. Stay close to me. It's—it's lonely—going." With a sigh as of a tired child she closed her eyes and seemed to try to cuddle to the warmth of the young body that was close to her. Then she lay quite still.