The eldest was a girl of about eighteen. She was tall and pretty, with a certain distinction that made people turn to look at her. The second girl was about fourteen, good-natured and easy-going at that age, as after. The third was a girl of about eleven, fond of dressing, fond of admiration, impulsive and warm-hearted. The fourth was a girl of five. Very fat and very pretty. She was sturdy and fought to go to school when she was three, so she went and stuck to it. The fifth was little better than a baby, just turned four, puny and delicate. So the farm was pretty full, you see, and it could be no light task to provide suitably for them all. CHAPTER III The bedroom was still. A candle burned on the chimney-piece, but its light was only feeble. In the bed lay a woman, wasted and weak, but at present sleeping, and there was no one else in the room. Downstairs, supper was being served to the workers, and in the small sitting-room the more grown-up members of the family sat. The children had gone to bed and were asleep; the farmer was away at a meeting in the neighbouring village. And so the cold, shivering days of December, Christmas and the New Year wore away. And with them silently and slowly the sufferer wore away too. For months she had lain in bed, waiting and wasting, and now the end of wait and waste was coming. It had fallen to the lot of the second daughter to act as nurse, and she fulfilled her part well. She was only a young girl, but had all a girl’s devotion. It fell to her daily task to read to the poor invalid the Litany from the Prayer-Book. Who could blame her if now and again she omitted long clauses? That Litany was so very long and dull, and the delight of skipping so refreshing. But even the Litany with its many repetitions must at last have an ending; and there came a day when it was no longer needed—for the poor soul that besought its God to hear it and have mercy on it had gone to take its peep behind the curtain. It was bitterly cold in the first month of the new year, and there upon the white bed lay the corpse. The smell of coffin wood and burial flowers intermingled—white waxen flowers that looked a part of the white waxen figure in the snowy shroud. Beautiful and peaceful and care-free was that thin face, now the restless fragment of life had left it. In the adjoining room, all alone upon the bed, sat Deborah, the little sickly baby. It wasn’t very nice having anybody dead in the house—you had all to go about quiet, and the rooms were dark. Just then the door opened, and in came Deborah’s eldest sister. She had been crying. “You may come with me to see mother,” she said. So together they went. Marion held the younger sister up so that she might see and kiss the dead face—and it was perhaps in that first glance at the dead that she became conscious of her own life.