"I can't tell her. I can't. It'll kill her.... I don't see how she's to live if Mark's dead.... I shall send for Aunt Bella. She can do it. Or I might ask Mrs. Waugh. Or Mr. Rollitt." She knew she wouldn't do any of these things. She would have to tell her. She heard the clock strike the half hour. Half-past five. Not yet. "When it strikes seven I shall go and tell Mamma." She lay down on her bed and listened for the strokes of the clock. She felt nothing but an immense fatigue, an appalling heaviness. Her back and arms were loaded with weights that held her body down on to the bed. "I shall never be able to get up and tell her." Six. Half-past. At seven she got up and went downstairs. Through the open side door she saw her mother working in the garden. She would have to get her into the house. "Mamma--darling." But Mamma wouldn't come in. She was planting the last aster in the row. She went on scooping out the hole for it, slowly and deliberately, with her trowel, and patting the earth about it with wilful hands. There was a little smudge of grey earth above the crinkles in her soft, sallow-white forehead. "You wait," she said. She smiled like a child pleased with itself for taking its own way. Mary waited. She thought: "Three hours ago I was angry with her. I was angry with her. And Mark was dead then. And when she read his letter. He was dead yesterday." IV. Time was not good to you. Time was cruel. Time made you see. Yet somehow they had gone through time. Nights of August and September when you got up before daybreak to listen at her door. Days when you did nothing. Mamma sat upright in her chair with her hands folded on her lap. She kept her back to the window: you saw her face darkening in the dusk. When the lamp came she raised her arm and the black shawl hung from it and hid her face. Nights of insane fear when you _had_ to open her door and look in to see whether she were alive or dead. Days when you were afraid to speak, afraid to look at each other. Nights when you couldn't sleep for wondering how Mark had died. They might have told you. They might have told you in one word. They didn't, because they couldn't; because the word was too awful. They would never say how Mark died. Mamma thought he had died of cholera. You started at sounds, at the hiss of the flame in the grate, the fall of the ashes on the hearth, the tinkling of the front door bell. You heard Catty slide back the bolt. People muttered on the doorstep. You saw them go back past the window, quietly, their heads turned away. They were ashamed.