Then, still speaking no word, she ran out and put clean sheets on her and her man's bed. She was on wires, she could not keep still, and all the morning she polished, polished. About noon she went out into her garden, and from under the glass plucked every flower that grew there--snowdrops, scillas, "angels' tears," quite two dozen blossoms. She brought them into the little parlour and opened its window wide. The sun was shining, and fell on the flowers strewn on the table, ready to be made into the nosegay of triumphant happiness. While she stood fingering them, delicately breaking half an inch off their stalks so that they should last the longer in water, she became conscious of someone on the pavement outside the window, and looking up saw Mrs. Clirehugh. The past, the sense of having been deserted by her friends, left her, and she called out: "Come in, Eliza; look at my flowers!" Mrs. Clirehugh came in; she was in black, her cheekbones higher, her hair looser, her eyes bigger. Mrs. Gerhardt saw tears starting from those eyes, wetting those high cheekbones, and cried out: "Why, what's the matter, dear?" Mrs. Clirehugh choked. "My baby!" Mrs. Gerhardt dropped an "angels' tear," and went up to her. "Whatever's happened?" she cried. "Dead!" replied Mrs. Clirehugh. "Dead o' the influenza. 'E's to be buried to-day. I can't--I can't--I can't--" Wild choking stopped her utterance. Mrs. Gerhardt put an arm round her and drew her head on to her shoulder. "I can't--I can't--" sobbed Mrs. Clirehugh; "I can't find any flowers. It's seein' yours made me cry." "There, there!" cried Mrs. Gerhardt. "Have them. I'm sure you're welcome, dearie. Have them--I'm so sorry!" "I don't know," choked Mrs. Clirehugh, "I 'aven't deserved them." Mrs. Gerhardt gathered up the flowers. "Take them," she said. "I couldn't think of it. Your poor little baby. Take them! There, there, he's spared a lot of trouble. You must look on the bright side, dearie." Mrs. Clirehugh tossed up her head. "You're an angel, that's what you are!" she said, and grasping the flowers she hurried out, a little black figure passing the window in the sunlight. Mrs. Gerhardt stood above the emptied table, thinking: "Poor dear--I'm glad she had the flowers. It was a mercy I didn't call out that Max was coming!" And from the floor she picked up one "angels' tear" she had dropped, and set it in a glass of water, where the sunlight fell. She was still gazing at it, pale, slender, lonely in that coarse tumbler, when she heard a knock on the parlour door, and went to open it. There stood her man, with a large brown-paper parcel in his hand. He stood quite still, his head a little down, the face very grey. She cried out; "Max!" but the thought flashed through her: "He knocked on the door! It's _his_ door--he knocked on the door!" "Dollee?" he said, with a sort of question in his voice.