“The club doctor could not come. Your father went twice. There was some one else, some one who paid. So your father went on into Swathinglea, and that man wouldn’t come unless he had his fee. And your father had changed his clothes to look more respectful and he hadn’t any money, not even his tram fare home. It seemed cruel to be waiting there with my baby thing in pain. . . . And I can’t help thinking perhaps we might have saved her. . . . But it was like that with the poor always in the bad old times—always. When the doctor came at last he was angry. ‘Why wasn’t I called before?’ he said, and he took no pains. He was angry because some one hadn’t explained. I begged him—but it was too late.” She said these things very quietly with drooping eyelids, like one who describes a dream. “We are going to manage all these things better now,” I said, feeling a strange resentment at this pitiful little story her faded, matter-of-fact voice was telling me. “She talked,” my mother went on. “She talked for her age wonderfully. . . . Hippopotamus.” “Eh?” I said. “Hippopotamus, dear—quite plainly one day, when her father was showing her pictures. . . And her little prayers. ‘Now I lay me. . . . down to sleep.’ . . . I made her little socks. Knitted they was, dear, and the heel most difficult.” Her eyes were closed now. She spoke no longer to me but to herself. She whispered other vague things, little sentences, ghosts of long dead moments. . . . Her words grew less distinct. Presently she was asleep and I got up and went out of the room, but my mind was queerly obsessed by the thought of that little life that had been glad and hopeful only to pass so inexplicably out of hope again into nonentity, this sister of whom I had never heard before. . . .