“Yes, I was alone with him.”
She said this in a manner which seemed to imply that there was nothing strange in the fact that she was alone with him. She was always alone with him, was she not? Was it necessary that she open the doors and call them all in because he was dying?
They passed from the narrow hall into the front room with its green-paper window-shades, its worn carpet and meagre furniture. His bed had been moved down from the floor above when his last illness had seized him, and here it had remained, a black walnut bedstead, with towering head-board, which shut out the light from one of the two windows in the room. This bedstead had been one of his few, his very few, extravagances in years gone by, and in its dark shadow he lay now rigid. He had been a stern, grizzled man in life, but the sternness then had been as very softness compared with the hard, cold outline of the lace now upon the pillow in the green light of the lowered window-shade.
They moved about the room on tip-toe, speaking in the hissing whispers considered appropriate by them in the presence of death.
“When did it happen?” some one asked.
“Half-hour ago.”
“Had n’t I better call the doctor or the minister?”
“I don’t see what good they’d be.”
Another woman crept in silently, a shawl huddled about her head.
“I jest heard,” she whispered.