Jane closed her eyes and clung to Katherine. The notion that her mother had killed herself had now become a certainty. It was so evident now that Katherine knew about it too. Before Jane’s eyes the drama of the suicide again played itself out in the theatre of her fancy. Her mother was standing and facing the little cabinet fastened to the wall of the bathroom. Her face was turned upward and the light from above shone down on it. One hand was against the wall of the room to keep the body from falling and the other hand held a bottle. The face turned up to the light was white, of a pasty whiteness. It was a face that from long association had become familiar to Jane but it was at the same time strangely unfamiliar. The eyes were closed and there were little reddish bags of flesh under the eyes. The lips hung loosely open and from one corner of the mouth a reddish brown streak ran down over the chin. Some spots of a brown liquid had fallen down over the white nightgown. Jane’s body was trembling violently. “How cold the house has become, Katherine,” she said and opened her eyes. They had reached the head of the stairs and from where they stood could look directly into the bathroom. There was a gray bath mat on the floor and a small brown bottle had been dropped on it. In passing out of the room the heavy foot of the woman, who had swallowed the contents of the bottle, had stepped on the bottle and had broken it. Perhaps her foot had been cut but she had not minded. “If there was pain, a hurt place, that would have been a comfort to her,” Jane thought. In her hand she still held the stone her father had given her. How absurd that he should have called it “the Jewel of Life.” There was a spot of yellowish green light reflected from an edge of the broken bottle on the floor of the bathroom. When her father had taken the little stone to the candle in the bedroom, and had held it up to the candle-light such another yellowish green light had flashed from it too. “If mother were still alive she would surely make some sound of life now. She would wonder what Katherine and I were doing tramping about the house and would get up and come to her bedroom door to inquire about it,” she thought drearily. * * * * * When Katherine had put Jane into her own bed, in a little room off the kitchen, she went upstairs to make certain arrangements. There had been no explanations. In the kitchen she had left a light burning and the servant’s bedroom was lighted by a reflected light, shining through an open doorway.