As he sat by the bed there flashed on him an irrational memory of that day in the field when the girls had found a wounded toad amidst the oat-sheaves, and how he had come up to them as they clustered round it in their pale gowns. It had been Blanche who had been most articulate in her pity, and yet Blanche had not scrupled to hurt him when it suited her. Phoebe, till these months of irritation and the dislike which had seemed to spring in her, had never wilfully hurt anyone. He felt he knew all of Phoebe there had been to know, and his heart softened over her as she slipped away from any power of his to tell her so. That flattened little form under the crumpled coverlet was Phoebe's, was the same body with which she had given him so much delight. This was the Phoebe who had hung about his neck in the valley and smothered his words upon his lips with kisses--she who had taught him her own knowledge of love, that instinctive knowledge of Aspasia and her sisters; it was through her he had become a man. So he felt now looking at her. With dawn, the day after the child's birth, it became plain that she could hold the frail thread of her life no longer. The nurse sat on one side of the bed; the doctor had not yet come back after leaving to attend another case. The child lay beside her, because the only time she spoke or showed any interest that night she had asked for it. Now she lay either asleep or already unconscious, her hair all pushed away from her face, which had fallen into hollows. She looked far older than her years--older than it would have been possible to imagine she ever could look. Ishmael sat very still, his mind as quiescent as his body; it was as though it had been hypnotised by its steady concentration on her approaching death as by the steady keeping of the eyes fixed on some one glittering object. All around that one point thought had ceased; impalpable walls shut off from consciousness everything else in the scheme of things. The focussing in the quiet room sharpened, grew more intense; the liquid light of dawn began to flood the air, and a bright shaft shot across the hill as the sun swam up over the rim of the moor. It fell across the bed, and Phoebe stirred and opened her eyes. Their gaze rested blankly on Ishmael, wandered round the room, then fell to the round head against her shoulder.