“I went back to bed—I’ll never forgive myself, but I wasn’t in my right senses yet. The fever kept coming back. I didn’t sleep very well, I _-will_ say that for myself. Even when I didn’t know how bad it was I was worried. I dreamed I was running up the steps of a big building, a funny sort of building I hadn’t ever noticed before, and it had big pillars along the front. All the time I was running—I remember it as plain as you are sitting here now——” And a lot plainer, Blake thought. “I kept thinking I must hold on to myself and try to expect something nice that was waiting for me in the building. I can’t quite say what it was like. As if I was fooling myself in my dream and knew it. I kept running and running and feeling worse.” She picked up another potato, but held it in her hand without beginning to peel it. “Then they woke me up and said it was morning and time to go to hospital. I went over and hurried right up to her room. And there——” she paused and stared at the henhouse. Then she started again. “There was her bed and the mark of somebody, but she wasn’t there. My legs just gave out. I yelled, I guess, and a nurse came and _I_ said ‘Where is Mamma?’ and the nurse said, ‘Well, miss, we’re crowded so we sent her away.’ I said, ‘Where to?’ Even then I didn’t understand. She looked at me queer and said, ‘To the morgue.’ “That’s how I was told.... Well, I started out and I met my brother Tom, and he said, 'Are you all right, Silvy?’ “I said, ‘Yes, I’m all right.’ “He said—he’s the sweetest thing in the world, Tom is, if he _is_ my brother and I oughtn’t to say it—‘You sure you can walk?’ “I said, ‘Yes, I can walk. Where’s the morgue?’ “So we went over there together, and when I saw it——” “It was that building with the pillars?” asked Blake. “The very one,” said Mrs. Bush. “And then Dad died too.” She put her hands down among the potato peelings and thought about it for a minute. “But it worries me, what she must think of me,” she said. “If I had only known she was dying. Dying, in front of my eyes, and me not doing anything about it. I wish she’d let me tell her. Lots of times I feel people I used to know around me, listening to me when I’m talking to them. The way you do in your head. But I never have that feeling about her. If she’d only let me tell her.” Blake said, “Oh, she knows.” “How do _you_ know?” cried Mrs. Bush, savagely. CHAPTER ELEVEN The screen-door slammed once, and Girt looked up hopefully, but decided it was a breeze. She should have known better, for there had been no breeze in Santa Fé for a week. But she was deep in the latest copy of “Screenland” and could spare time only for the paper bag of chocolates next to her. The door slammed three times, and Teddy called out indignantly, “Anybody home?”