And now they were giving her morphia. Under the torpor of the drug her face changed; the muscles loosened, the flesh sagged, the widened, swollen mouth hung open; only the broad beautiful forehead, the beautiful calm eyebrows were the same; the face, sallow white, half imbecile, was a mask flung aside. She couldn’t bear to look at it; it wasn’t her mother’s face; her mother had died already under the morphia. She had a shock every time she came in and found it still there. On the day her mother died she told herself she was glad and thankful. She met her friends with a little quiet, composed face, saying, “I’m glad and thankful she’s at peace.” But she wasn’t thankful; she wasn’t glad. She wanted her back again. And she reproached herself, one minute for having been glad, and the next for wanting her. She consoled herself by thinking of the sacrifices she had made, how she had given up Sidmouth, and how willingly she would have paid the hundred pounds. “I sometimes think, Hatty,” said Mrs. Hancock, melancholy and condoling, “that it would have been very different if your poor mother could have had her wish.” “What--what wish?” “Her wish to live in Sidmouth, near your Aunt Harriett.” And Sarah Barmby, sympathizing heavily, stopping short and brooding, trying to think of something to say: “If the operation had only been done three years ago when they _knew_ it would save her----” “Three years ago? But we didn’t know anything about it then.” “_She_ did.... Don’t you remember? It was when I stayed with her.... Oh, Hatty, didn’t she tell you?” “She never said a word.” “Oh, well, she wouldn’t hear of it, even then when they didn’t give her two years to live.” Three years? She had had it three years ago. She had known about it all that time. Three years ago the operation would have saved her; she would have been here now. Why had she refused it when she knew it would save her? She had been thinking of the hundred pounds. To have known about it three years and said nothing--to have gone believing she hadn’t two years to live---- _That_ was her secret. That was why she had been so calm when Papa died. She had known she would have him again so soon. Not two years---- “If I’d been them,” Lizzie was saying, “I’d have bitten my tongue out before I told you. It’s no use worrying, Hatty. You did everything that could be done.” “I know. I know.” She held up her face against them; but to herself she said that everything had not been done. Her mother had never had her wish. And she had died in agony, so that she, Harriett, might keep her hundred pounds. IX In all her previsions of the event she had seen herself surviving as the same Harriett Frean with the addition of an overwhelming grief. She was horrified at this image of herself persisting beside her mother’s place empty in space and time.