“There is no one with him now, dear; Mrs. Jupp is in the sitting–room, so very kindly lent us by the good landlady. Only two more pairs of stairs, and there our Cradock lies, not a bit worse than he was; if anything, a little better; and his faithful little Wena with him: she wonʼt leave him, night or day, dear. Give me your hand, Amy. Why, I declare, it is rather dark, when you get too far from the windows! Madam, come in with us.” But Eliza Ducksacre, though little versed in mintage, and taking pig–rings for halfpence, knew when her presence had better be absence, as well as a sleeping partner does at the associationʼs bankruptcy. So, after showing them up to the door, she slipped away into the side–cupboard which Mr. Rosedew had called a “sitting–room.” Then John took Amyʼs bonnet off (after ruining the strings), and stroked her pretty hair down, and took her young cheeks in his hands, and begged her not to tremble so, because she would quite upset him. Only she might cry a little, if she thought it would do her good. But when she put her hand up, and gave a dry sob only, the father led her very tenderly into the little chamber. It was a wretched little room, like a casual pauperʼs home, when he gets one, only much lower and smaller. Amy took all of it in at a glance, for in matters of that sort a womanʼs perception is, when compared to a manʼs, as forked lightning compared to a blunt dessert fork. She even knew why the bed was awry; which her father could sooner have written ten scolia than discover. The bed was placed so because poor Cradock, jumping up all of a sudden in an early stage of illness, and before his head grew soft, had knocked a great piece of plaster away from the projecting hip–beam. Now Craddy was looking away from them, sitting up in the sack–cloth bed, and trying with the sage gravity of fixed hallucination to read some lines which his fancy had written on the glazed dirt that served for a window. That window perhaps pronounced itself more by candlelight than by daylight, and the landlord had forbidden any attempt at cleaning it, because he knew that the frame would drop out. Two candles, the residue of two pounds which Mr. Rosedew had paid for, only helped to interpret the squalid room more forcibly. While Amy stood there, shocked and frightened, and her father was thinking what to say, the poor sick fellow turned towards them, and his eyes met hers. She saw that the tint of her loverʼs eyes was gone from a beautiful deep grey to the tone of a withered oak–leaf, the pupils forthstanding haggardly, the whites dull and chased with blood veins, the sockets marked with a cloudy blue, and channeled with storms of sorrow; the countenance full of long suffering—gaunt, and wan, and weary.