The room was small and dingy: opposite to the door an old-fashioned tent-bed hung with curtains of a huge-patterned chintz, immense flowers on a black ground: a candle standing on a small table by the bedside, another faintly blinking from the mantelpiece beyond, the darkness of everything around bringing into fuller relief the whiteness of the bed, the pillows heaped up to support a restless head, a worn and ghastly face, with large, gleaming eyes, which seemed to have an independent, restless life of their own. The face had been pretty when Wentworth had known it first. It was scarcely recognisable now. The cheek bones had become prominent, the lower part of the face worn away almost to nothing, the eyes enlarged in their hollow caves. She looked as she had been said to be--dying--except that the light in her eyes spoke of a secret force which might be fever, or might be because they were the last citadel of life. But though she seemed at the last extremity of existence, a few efforts had been made to ornament and adorn the dying creature, efforts which added unspeakably, horribly, to the ghastly look of her face. The collar of her night-dress had been folded over a pink ribbon, leaving bare an emaciated throat, round which was a little gold chain, suspending a locket: and her hair, still plentiful and pretty, the one human decoration which does not fade, was carefully dressed, though somewhat disordered by the continual motion of her restlessness. It was all horrible to Wentworth, death masquerading in the poor little vanities which were so unspeakably mean and small in comparison with that majesty, and all to please _him_--God help the forlorn creature! to make her look as when he had praised her prettiness, she from whom every prettiness, every possibility of pleasing, had gone. She held out her two hands, which were worn to skin and bone, ‘Oh, Oliver, my Oliver! oh, I knew he would come. Oh, didn’t I say he would come?’ she cried. Wentworth could not but take the bony fingers into his own. He saw that it was expected he should kiss her; but that was impossible. He sat down in the chair which had been placed for him by the bedside. ‘I am very sorry to see you so ill, my poor girl,’ he said. ‘Ill’s not the word, Mr. Wentworth; she’s dying. She hasn’t above an hour or two in this world,’ said the mother, or the woman who took a mother’s place. He gave her a look of horrified reproach, with the usual human sense that it is cruel to announce this fact too clearly. ‘I hope it is not quite so bad as that.’