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Suddenly he heard a strange noise. Turning round, he saw his father’s eyes wide open, strained and rolling in a frenzy of inhuman struggling. Gerald started to his feet, and stood transfixed in horror.

“Wha-a-ah-h-h-” came a horrible choking rattle from his father’s throat, the fearful, frenzied eye, rolling awfully in its wild fruitless search for help, passed blindly over Gerald, then up came the dark blood and mess pumping over the face of the agonised being, the tense body relaxed, the head fell aside, down the pillow.

Gerald stood transfixed, his soul echoing in horror. He would move, but he could not. He could not move his limbs. His brain seemed to re-echo, like a pulse.

The nurse in white softly entered. She glanced at Gerald, then at the bed.

“Ah!” came her soft whimpering cry, and she hurried forward to the dead man. “Ah-h!” came the slight sound of her agitated distress, as she stood bending over the bedside. Then she recovered, turned, and came for towel and sponge. She was wiping the dead face carefully, and murmuring, almost whimpering, very softly: “Poor Mr. Criers—Poor Mr. Crich!—Oh, poor Mr. Crich!”

“Is he dead?” clanged Gerald’s sharp voice.

“Oh yes, he’s gone,” replied the soft, moaning voice of the nurse, as she looked up at Gerald’s face. She was young and beautiful and quivering. A strange sort of grin went over Gerald’s face, over the horror. And he walked out of the room.

He was going to tell his mother. On the landing he met his brother Basil.

“He’s gone, Basil,” he said, scarcely able to subdue his voice, not to let an unconscious, frightening exultation sound through.

“What?” cried Basil, going pale.

Gerald nodded. Then he went on to his mother’s room.

She was sitting in her purple gown, sewing, very slowly sewing, putting in a stitch, then another stitch. She looked up at Gerald with her blue, undaunted eyes.

“Father’s gone,” he said.

“He’s dead? Who says so?”

“Oh, you know, mother, if you see him.”

She put her sewing down, and slowly rose.

“Are you going to see him?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

By the bedside the children already stood in a weeping group.

“Oh, mother!” cried the daughters, almost in hysterics, weeping loudly.

But the mother went forward. The dead man lay in repose, as if gently asleep, so gently, so peacefully, like a young man sleeping in purity. He was still warm. She stood looking at him in gloomy, heavy silence, for some time.

“Ay,” she said bitterly, at length, speaking as if to the unseen witnesses of the air. “You’re dead.” She stood for some minutes in silence, looking down. “Beautiful,” she asserted, “beautiful as if life had never touched you—never touched you. God send I look different. I hope I shall look my years, when I am dead. Beautiful, beautiful,” she crooned over him. “You can see him in his teens, with his first beard on his face. A beautiful soul, beautiful—” Then there was a tearing in her voice as she cried: “None of you look like this, when you are dead! Don’t let it happen again.” It was a strange, wild command from out of the unknown. Her children moved unconsciously together, in a nearer group, at the dreadful command in her voice. The colour was flushed bright in her cheek, she looked awful and wonderful. “Blame me, blame me if you like, that he lies there like a lad in his teens, with his first beard on his face. Blame me if you like. But you none of you know.” She was silent in intense silence. Then there came, in a low, tense voice: “If I thought that the children I bore would lie looking like that in death, I’d strangle them when they were infants, yes—”

“No, mother,” came the strange, clarion voice of Gerald from the background, “we are different, we don’t blame you.”

She turned and looked full in his eyes. Then she lifted her hands in a strange half-gesture of mad despair.

“Pray!” she said strongly. “Pray for yourselves to God, for there’s no help for you from your parents.”

“Oh mother!” cried her daughters wildly.

But she had turned and gone, and they all went quickly away from each other.

When Gudrun